More Than You Know ~ by Beth Gutcheon

Title, author, date of book, and genre?
More Than You Know, by Beth Gutcheon, 2000, fiction

What made you want to read this book?
A friend recommended it a couple of years ago, and it's a book about Maine, making it an excellent choice for Book around the States.

Summarize the book without giving away the ending.
The place is Dundee, on the coast of Maine. The time is the present ... and the time WAS 1848. This book has two intertwined stories: Hannah Gray returns to Dundee and tells a story about Conary Crocker, the love of her life; Claris Osgood lived on nearby Beale Island, a hundred years earlier. And there's that abandoned schoolhouse. This novel bridges two centuries, two mother-daughter relationships, and two tragic love stories. Well into the book we begin to understand that someone in the 19th-century story has become the very unquiet soul haunting the 20th century.

What did you think of the main character?
Really, there are two: Hannah has a passionate and painful story of true love and loss: the story of a ghost that appeared in her life, and in the life of Conary Crocker, the wild and appealing boy who loved her. Claris got married in Dundee a hundred years earlier, and her marriage was a very unhappy one.

Did you think the story was funny, sad, touching, disturbing, moving?
That "unquiet spirit" or ghost was not as scary as I had expected it to be, from reviews I had read.

What did you like most about the book?
I enjoyed the setting, being in Maine, learning the islands were often settled first, before the land itself, because it was easier to sail to the islands.

What did you like least?
I would have enjoyed one story at a time, probably the one about Claris and her unhappy life. The novel is essentially two stories of doomed love and its consequences for future generations. In 1858 Claris Osgood defies her parents and marries taciturn Daniel Haskell, moving with him to the island where, too late, she discovers her new husband's narrow-minded religious fundamentalism and corrosively mean personality. The marriage produces two children, but becomes increasingly rancorous. It will end in murder.

What do you think will be your lasting impression of this book?
I think I'll remember Claris.

How would you rate the book?
Rated: 8/10, a very good book

http://framedandbooked.blogspot.com/2007/08/armchair-traveler-challenge.html