"Water, Stone, Heart"

"Water, Stone, Heart" is Will North's second novel and  one review likens him to Nicholas Sparks and I suppose with the romance angle I can see that but it has so much depth to the story that I can't think of another author to compare North to.

The story centers around two people and the setting is in Bocastle.  Bocastle is a real village on the north coast of Cornwall in southeast England that experienced a devastating flood in August of 2004.  This novel is based on that event and some of the characters (renamed for privacy purposes) are real people but everything else is fiction.  This was a devastating event and it was a miracle that not one person (tourists or locals) died in the flood.

Our main characters are Andrew Stratton, a Professor of archeology at a Philadelphia university and Nicola Rhys-Jones, an ex-pat and local artist.  Andrew (renamed Drew by Lily, a local 9-year-old girl who claims Drew and Nicola as her best friends) is newly divorced and looking for an escape from his predictable life in Philadelphia.  He has come to Bocastle to learn to piece rocks together to build intricate walls -- called stone hedges.  It is hard work and a great distraction but building the wall changes Drew and the wall he's built around himself starts to come down as he works on the project.

Nicola has walls, too, that she hides from those around her -- childhood sexual abuse and a divorce from a man who also abused her physically.  She's a brilliant artist who has found her place in this community but finds herself unable to open her heart to try to love again.

The community welcomes Drew and he and Nicola encounter each other through Lily and at the pub and almost anywhere they might go in this small village.  At first they enjoy verbal sparring but eventually their banter deepens to love but first they have to conquer their personal demons.

I'm going to quote a passage that, to me, shows North's writing ability - It's on page 131 of the hardback book:  "After Katerina left him, his heart had shriveled like a hard, infolded black raisin..."

In his acknowledgement, North thanks Lorie Dwinell, a teacher and friend, and Dr. Lucy Berliner at Seattle's Harborview Center for Sexual Assault and Traumatic Stress for their help with the very serious subject of the lifelong psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse.  This is an important part of this story.  pazt