Summer, vital parenthesis. Who else who least remembers that summer with his first love more or less fulfilled, more or less romantic but always idealized. Sometimes it seems as if other of our possible lives have traced other paths through new temporal planes from that vertex of the summer of youth that seemed endless.
If you also happen to be reading a novel about a first love from the late eighties, a time when you yourself went through that adolescence full of transcendental love feelings but that end up fading in the light of the transience of those ages, you empathize even more with a character like Maeve Donnelly.
In the case of the protagonist of this novel, her turning point, the moment in which her first love is suspended in the limbo of her first youth, everything happened in a frenzy. In the summer of 1988, Maeve manages to share a splendid moment with Daniel, including a kiss. But under that impetuous rhythm of the time of youth, the intrepid Maeve, passionate about the sea already in her tender age, enters the waters at the same moment in which a blacktip shark, naturally fond of shallow waters, passes by and ends up biting it.
It is easy to understand that the accident erased or served as a point of divergence for the love story in the making. And yet, Maeve's passion for the sea only grew despite the mishap that could have ended her life.
We already have the two life plans of Maeve. What could be and what was. And the progress of Maeve's life along the path of farewell to youth, naturally, with the abandonment of a first love submerged in the waters of a sea that nevertheless awaited her as a subject of study for the future marine biologist. The author then poses a curious paradox ... Maeve chose to learn more about what was about to end her life while she put aside that love that lived with the incident in the same summer. Maeve wanted to learn more about pain than succumbing to love.
But it is not a tragic novel, quite the contrary. Maeve's return to the island of her youth places her before a crossing of the two vital lines drawn. And it is then when we enjoy the contradictions of the human being, with a point of humor and a romantic taste about what is had in consolidated love and what is sensed in lost love.
Maeve tries to survive. Years after the event, his return to the island causes the reunion with Daniel. But at her side is Nicholas, a lover like her of the seas and oceans. Past, present and the doubts of a future that connects with one or another timeline. Because in the end, there is only one life.
You can now buy the novel Hotel of the Muses, the book by Ann Kidd Taylor, here: