Kaitlyn Bragdon-Roe

Cherie Burns does a good job of putting the listener in the shoes of those living through the great hurricane of 1938. However, she spends an inordinate amount of time for the introduction and consistantly includes NY's Long Island in her definition of New England. These are not fatal flaws though they are annoying to one who lives in the real New England. The most frustrating parts of the book are these though: 1) she spends too much time talking about the rich people from New York and, 2) she all but IGNORES Massachusettes and the devastation occurring there, and finally, 3) she is obviously not native to the area or she would have heard of the hurricane of 38 (not the "great hurricane of 1938") growing up on Nantucket. Anyone whose family owned a house on the South Coast of Massachusettes was raised hearing about this storm and the one in '54 which she does not mention at all.
Finally, she does a good job of covering the basics and her storytelling skills are more than passable. I would recommend this book, especially as a jumping off point for further investigation into this and other "great" storms in New England.

I am normally pretty savvy when it comes to this kind of book, but I COULD NOT UNDERSTAND A THING, NOT THE TIME FRAME, THE DIALOGUE, ANY OF IT! Maybe I will try again later, but too confusing for me.

I love Virginia Woolf. I didn't love this book. I saw the movie, which prompted me to read it and I was disappointed in the final outcome. That is not to say it is not meticulously written, edited and presented... it is all of those things. I just really had a hard time staying with it... the back and forth of the timelines, the jumping from each character to the next... these were frustrating and not assuaged when pulled together at the end. If you love Virginia, by all means listen to it, but when you're done, sign up for the Netflix copy of the film.