Waterwoman

This novel explores loyalty and responsibility to family versus the desire to choose a life of one's own. The story is told &om the first-person viewpoint of Annie Revels, who is born in 1900 on a barrier island off the coast of Virginia's Eastern Shore. The story also explores the positive and negative aspects of a life spent in intimate isolation. Annie must battle the vagaries of nature, the prejudices of a male-dominated culture, and the tensions of a crippled family unit. Most importantly, she must face the conflicting desires that threaten her known world, and hard decisions which may lead her, and those she cares about, to destruction. Though this is a historical novel, I took liberties with the placement of some real-life characters in time, such as Old Man Cobb who, in real life, with his sons parlayed a simple wreck salvage operation into a family dynasty from the mid to late 1800s. Others, like Annie and Nathan, are fictional composites. Yaupon Island is also fictional, though it is based on a number of similar islands which throughout the history of the Shore supported families with such varied industries as sheep farming, fishing, wrecking and salvage, and guide work. Details of the natural world, domestic details, and the waterman's trade were researched for authenticity, though a few shifts in time and placement have been made in the service of fiction.