futurista

A soft spoken man in an unhappy marriage falls for his cousin's wife who has come to live with them, and the story goes downhill from there (literally). Maybe the reason I like this book more than most of the reviewers on Goodreads is that I like dark stories and because I wasn't forced to read it as many of them were. I knew going into the story that it wasn't going to end well. Not many books from the period of realism escape the stark, depressing reality of the time. The foreshadowing is strong enough in the book that you know that something bad is coming and probably by what means; you just don't know exactly how the story is going to unfold.

The story itself is gorgeously put down. It's soft like the story's fallen snow and like the words of Ethan. Every action is slight but calculated. The reader feels the emotions of the characters deeply through their various silences.

There is such a singular storyline that Ethan Frome reads more like a short story than a novel. It can easily be read in a couple of hours. However, it seems like the type of story that will stay with you for a lifetime.