Osprey Island [Hardcover]

A perfect novel for summer, Nissen sets the story on a New Jersey island of few inhabitants until summer when vacationers come in droves to the Lodge which has seen better days. The housekeepers are young women from Ireland and the waiters and other service workers are college kids, mostly young men. The maintenance manager and head housekeeper are drunks married to one another and their young son, Squee, is the crux of the story together with the Lodge itself. There are several romances to track, one which will break your heart; and there buried secrets and tragedies as well as insights about outsiders, relationships and mutable truths. Birders, in particular, will be attracted to the book which imparts many interesting tidbits about osprey including their close encounter with extinction and return to unendangered status. I loved this book; read it straight through couldn't put it down.

Love, confusion, tourism engulf a tiny island

Reviewed by Amy Westervelt Sunday, July 11, 2004

"The Good People of New York," Thisbe Nissen's first novel, was extraordinarily well received and not at all a bad piece of fiction, but I remember thinking that I liked her short stories better -- a fairly common reaction to the first novel of a short-story writer. Thankfully, Nissen's second novel, "Osprey Island," blows her short stories out of the water. Whereas in "The Good People of New York," she took what had worked well in short form and then just made it longer, in "Osprey Island" she uses that extra space to develop rich, real characters.

In keeping with the almost theatrical feel of the story (the narrative is very dialogue-driven, most of the action is set at a particular locale -- the Lodge at Osprey Island -- there is a slow climb toward a tragic climax and then a slow decline toward resolution), the characters are introduced at the front of the book, along with their age and "role." These characters' lives are each complete stories in their own right (perhaps also because of Nissen's beginnings), but because the majority of them also grew up on a tiny island together, their stories overlap, then diverge, then meet again in increasingly interesting ways.

At its core, "Osprey Island" is the story of small-town America. Everyone knows his neighbor's business, everyone looks out for the other members of the community, and there are just a handful of businesses -- one pharmacy, one lunch counter, one post office, one bar. Much as the town of Osprey and its inhabitants, its primary business -- the Lodge -- is a dilapidated structure with just enough fresh paint to qualify as quaint instead of shabby. Every summer the island plays host to a herd of pretty young Irish girls who work at the lodge and to uppity East Coast tourists from the mainland. The tourists' money keeps the island running the other nine months of the year, but we only hear about them thirdhand, as the entire novel takes place in the month before the lodge opens one summer in 1988.

As with any small town, the Osprey locals grow up with an itch to leave, and few return. And like most small towns, there is plenty of action brewing beneath a deceptively calm surface. In just one month on the island there are love stories and a tragic accident, familial drama and sordid affairs, but the overarching plot is almost secondary to the individual stories of Osprey Island's characters. These are real people, and Nissen makes us care for them. We cry for the drunken housewife who wants to do better, knows she can do better, but doesn't. She is our lovable cousin who will always be a loser. We feel sorry for her equally alcoholic husband, who's a complete ass, but only because he's been so abused his entire life. It's no excuse, but it does make it easy to feel sorry for him. We worry about their child. He reminds us of that neighbor kid, the hooligan about whom our mothers used to shake their heads and say, "That poor kid never had a chance." We get frustrated when a 36- year-old woman petulantly back-talks her father, over and over again, but we can understand why she does it, and know that he sort of deserves it.

In fact, so enchanting are the characters that the story they inhabit is not only secondary, but almost seems to get in the way at times. There are entire passages of description that readers will be tempted to skim over just to get to what is happening with their favorite character. This is especially true of Nissen's descriptions of romantic interactions. These paragraphs are forced and fumbling; they seem to have been tweaked or rewritten by an editor. Nissen's voice is not natural in these scenes; she's better suited to innuendo than describing the nitty-gritty details.

Another obstacle to our beloved characters is the osprey-related material from various books and poems that precede each chapter. The osprey is a bird, and obviously the namesake of Osprey Island. There is, undoubtedly, a shed- load of symbolism in the bird, but again, we don't care. We don't have time for other books, other authors, other protagonists. And we certainly don't have time for birds. We want to find out if our sad housewife is going to turn it around. We want to see if the reunited high school sweethearts are really well matched, or if it's just a summer fling. We want to make sure that young boy doesn't become a delinquent because of his parents. Ironically, we are trapped on Osprey Island and we love it. We're not looking for ways to leave the island, but ways to stay there, and blend with the locals. *

Amy Westervelt is a San Francisco writer.

I won't say that Thisbe Nissen is a terrible writer, because she's not. She knows how to string sentences together and has good grammar, but she has no imagination and nothing in her world comes to life.

This novel is about a bunch of characters working at a lodge in an island on the east coast of the United States. You have the owners of the hotel, their daughter, two alcoholic maintenance workers, a broody teenager whose job I don't even remember, a group of Irish maids, a handyman and his "eccentric" mother, and two children that Nissen tries too hard to make endearing. The characters have to be the biggest flaw this book contains. They have zero personality. I know a few facts about each one, but there's nothing that really sets them apart as individuals. Gavin was exactly the same as Roddy, and Brigid was exactly the same as Suzy.

I also got the impression that the author wanted us to sympathize with certain characters and hate others, but she does too much telling instead of showing and therefore fails. I found Suzy to be a completely moronic and despicable character, yet I get the feeling I'm supposed to like her. Nissen seems to feel that as long as she has her characters point out their own stupidity, they're excused and said stupidity can't be held against them. So no, having Suzy point out how sleazy she is for sneaking around to have sex with a guy she's only had three conversations with instead of taking care of her daughter after someone has died in a fire does not "humanize" her in any way. In fact it makes her seem like an even bigger bitch, because we're shown that she realizes how big of a jackass she is, but yet she still continues to make stupid decisions. She's also extremely bratty and entitled, but again, I feel like I'm supposed to think she's one of the good guys. None of the characters in this book are particularly sympathetic, except for the boy "Squee", even though he's also a cardboard with no personality. The other child character, Mia, was a complete waste of page time and her entire existence should've been cut out of the book. I get the feeling she only exists in the story because Nissen couldn't think of another way to get Suzy to visit Osprey Island every summer without changing the "hate" between her and her parents. I can think of at least five different plot lines she could have used. Nissen also does way too much "telling" about the villains. She tells us all the things wrong with them, but except for Lance and Lorna, we don't really SEE what's wrong with them. In fact, they come across as normal people, and I had to wonder why they were written about with such venom. If you want me to think someone's a jerk, don't tell me that they're jerks and then portray them as perfectly nice people.

Other than not being well developed, I think there were way too many characters. None of them were interesting to read about, but others were definitely more boring, such as Gavin, Janna, Squee's grandparents (who are barely there at all and are treated unfairly by the author), and Mia. There were too many story lines to keep up with, and when you have characters that aren't engaging, it gets annoying trying to keep up with a whole bunch of problems related to characters you couldn't care less about.

The whole think with the osprey got irritating as well. It could have been tolerable if the symbol of the bird had been used sparingly, but Nissen went way over the top with making it show up all over the place. I didn't find it interesting at all either (but that may just be me) and I kept wishing she'd just get on with the story and stop talking about the birds.

Overall, this book was a chore to finish and not worth the money I spent on it.