The Great Offshore Grounds

Open The Great Offshore Grounds, by Vanessa Veselka, and fall in love with unconventional characters, a wonderfully Byzantine origin story, and a plot that will sweep you away like a tidal wave for over 400 pages. You wont want it to end!

This is what I call a Big Novel. Much of it takes place on the ocean, with nods to Moby Dick, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and the startling, yet true story of the shipwrecked Essex. Veselkas personal experience and excellent research really shine through the at sea part of the narrative.

At its heart it is the story of a family. Cheyenne and Livy are sisters with a birth story that is like a fairy tale. Now they are in their mid-thirties embarking on a road trip to discover a missing piece of their story. I love stories about sisters! I identify with them, even if the characters are very different from my own sister and me, as these sisters are (although one of them IS cheap [not me!]) There is something universal about the relationship between sisters that Veselka truly captures.

Their brother, Essex (nicknamed for the famous shipwreck), was an eleven year old street kid when Cheyenne dragged him home to live with them. To say theirs is an unconventional family is to severely understate. And as the story progresses, the puzzle of Cheyenne and Livys origin becomes even more twisty than any fairy tale could imagine.

The Great Offshore Grounds was on the National Book Award Long-List, and it is solidly going on my person 2020 Top Twenty List!

The commanding title opens to reveal an epic family drama/adventure story. Hooks you in steadily, veers off-balance, its edgy, but the rewards are many and youll experience an influx of emotions. I liked not knowing where this is going, but arrived at the finale feeling gratified. Veselka digs deep into the psyche of the human condition. Along the way, you will learn the shipwrights way of life and receive a humbling, visceral education on the workings and working on a skiff, vessel, boat, while Livy labors toward her dream of fishing in Alaskato pursue her desired occupation.

Half-sisters Livy and Cheyenne, born on the same day, run separately and headlong into transformational crises. Essex, their younger brother, was brought home by Cheyenne like a stray pup as an adolescent and raised by their mother, Kirsten. The characters in this book are so full that they pop on every page. Moreover, the story is complex with an occasional exotic choice of settings, and prose that is often rugged and poetic, mixed with some myths and the ghosts of the dead, such as Sir Walter Raleigh.

Standing at the beachheadnot all that far from the Roanoke River, or even from Hatteras Island, a place of ghostslooking east, the ghost of Sir Walter Raleigh is caught in a loop of time. Every night, he flees his lost colony and sails for El Dorado.

The author is a brawny language artist and pulls off genuine sentiment, too. The siblings care deeply for one another and for Kirsten, and for each of their flaws or blind spots is a flair for the heroic, too even when in survival mode. All are striving for intimacy and personal agency, and the struggles to achieve that shape a brilliant and seductive story. Maybe the hardest thing to see straight is love. Its not the view through the window but the frame around it, and the glass is gone.

Unlike the more opaque sisters, Essex is open, generous, transparent, and sporadically heartsick. His journey leads to an unlikely bridge for his spirit and a channel for his courage. He takes a shot at a 180 and the narrative heightens. Move over Mr. Darcyyouve got nothing on Essex. Compared to him, youre just dour and clinically depressed.

In the pending of action, Veselkas narrative pauses periodically to observe on the ground; seaward, or she augments spectral images with the history of those that wandered the Earth.in 1890, a Paiute man with messianic visions manifested a dance. the dance united the spirits of the indigenous dead with those of the living. It infused the People with the powerful magic necessary to halt colonial expansion. The Ghost Dance. It spread across the country. In a rage of eerie faith, it scorched the battlefield at Wounded Knee with ghostly fire.

Literature lovers, this is a powerful story of love, family, intimacy, trauma, assault, siblings, children, and making your own family. Its the story of the ghosts who haunt us, the dawn that awaits us, the land and sea beneath our feet, and the North Star.

For the four family members at the center of Vanessa Veselkas superb new novel: messy, solipsistic, self-indulgent, painful, deep. Kirstin, the mother, is a practicing witch who raised her two daughters to believe they were heroes in myths of their own making. Cheyenne, the oldest, is fleeing a failed marriage and several subsequent bad decisions. Livy is trying to climb out of a financial hole by crewing on an Alaskan fishing boat. Essex, a teenage runaway the family took in, drives a cab part-time and moons after Cheyenne.

The story starts as a picaresque odyssey. Cheyenne and Livy learn that one of them has a different birth mother than Kirstin, but Kirsten wont tell them which one. They set off to track this unknown mother down. From there, the characters pinball from the Pacific Northwest to the east coast, all the way out to the great offshore grounds of the Pacific Ocean. The novel deepens as the characters struggle to define what they want from the world and what they feel for each other.

These are deeply flawed characters. Veselkas achievement is to make us sympathize with their perverse integrity and care about their ultimate happiness. She writes with a fierce, propulsive particularity that captures the grit of the physical world as experienced by people who dont have much insulation from it. The writing about Livys work aboard ships is particularly fine-grained and compelling. The family’s road trips give us a skewed, poetic view of the Great American Wierd.

The Great Offshore Grounds is bold, ambitious storytelling and should be in the conversation for this years major fiction awards.

This book was recommended by a book-tuber that I regularly watch, so I gave it try. The beginning is good, but it’s downhill from there. To sum it up I would say it is about a cast of lazy characters who blame everyone else for their hardships. It is not interesting at all. I read over half of it, thinking it would get better. It didn’t and I could not finish it. Just a waste of money.

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