STERN MEN by Elizabeth Gilbert

My chief complaint about this book is that the pace is super pokey.  On the plus side, the storyline is good, and the writing is excellent.  Best of all, the dialog is snappy, sassy, and salty, and I could describe the characters with the same adjectives.  The protagonist is Ruth Thomas, a 19-year-old who has come to a crossroads in her life.  Fresh out of a stodgy Delaware boarding school, she has returned home to Fort Niles, a Maine island where lobster fishing is the only available career.  Ruth has ties to Lanford Ellis, the richest man on the island, and their connection is unveiled piece by piece as the story unfolds.  Ruth does not want to return to the mainland to attend college, but she really is too smart to spend the rest of her life in a lobster boat.  Her father is a successful fisherman on Fort Niles, but her mother lives in New Hampshire—again, for reasons to be revealed later.  The backdrop of the book is the lobster industry—its rivalries, territory disputes, superstitions, and certainly its hold on the people who do it for a living, generation after generation.  The crisp dialog is what really appealed to me, though, as these islanders occasionally say the darnedest things, such as, “A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that don’t make ‘em biscuits.”