Bill Silva’s Reviews > Ocean State > Status Update

This was a disappointment. O’Nan is a great writer, but his descriptive skills fail him here—we learn more about driving the roads of coastal Rhode Island than about the motivations and interior lives of his characters. Since we know most of the story from the beginning, I was hoping for more complexity and imagination…but the novel follows a rather predictable path, and the ending is flat. Very unsatisfying.