This was my second read of the book, having read it years ago I came across it and decided to read it again since I couldn't really remember what it was about. That's one thing, the cover and blurb were so appealing it made me read it twice! Since I also lived in FL for 6 years and recently relocated to TN the book made me homesick for FL. I would love to move back.
As for the book itself, I really enjoyed the narrative of the recent widow and her story of how she met and fell in love with a fisherman named Nick Blue. While it wasn't a secret, the reader knows near the beginning that she will end up alone, it's a touching story and really stresses the strength of women and family. A good, good read. ( )

I had forgotten how much I love this book and its characters. Nick Blue is the man we all want to love, and are also afraid to love. This book reminded me that in my soul I am a romantic- I love the part where Mattie fantasies about being trapped inside the house with Nick during a hurricane, and grilling gruyere sandwiches together. This is something that I would think about, and after I read this, it is something I want to do, hunker down during a snowstorm (I am in Michigan)with my husband and grill gruyere sandwiches too. ( )

A stunningly beautiful book. The prose is lyrical, the story simultaneously grounded in earth, sky, the natural world of sea and shells - while also laced with fancy by including references to the call of the dolphins. The story follows lonely Mattie until she meets Nick Blue. They fall in love hard and fast. But from the very first pages, you know that Mattie is widowed. So I read with intense feeling, knowing that their marriage had already ended. AS the story unfolds, Mattie finds acceptance into Nick's family as part of their marriage.

Highly recommended!!!! ( )

Mattie Fiona O’Rourke Blue, the narrator of Remembering Blue (2000) by Connie May Fowler, commemorates her lost husband Nick (Proteus Nicholas Blue), a shrimper of Greek descent who lived, alongside his extended family, on the island of Lethe in the Big Bend of Florida’s Gulf Coast. In a pattern reminiscent of Hurston and Rawlings, Nick draws Mattie, an orphan working in a convenience store, into a world of natural beauty and complex family relations. But Nick is bedeviled by the family fate of early, and often mysterious, deaths at sea--underpinned by a family myth he relates to Mattie:

“Like some of us on my daddy’s side of the family used to be dolphins. And if
we’re dolphins, we’re free. See? But when we’re men, we’re not…. This is the
part that scares me. The legend says that sometimes the dolphins decide they want
one of us back.” (Fowler 71)

When Nick and Mattie return to live on Lethe, they build a house, plant a garden, and each finds purpose -- Nick in his beloved shrimping and Mattie in returning to college and forging ties with the Blue family. For over two years they live an idyllic existence interrupted only by typical extended-family trials. Even the threat of Hurricane Cerberus is met with thorough preparations, and all safely weather the storm. But Mattie presciently muses about the name of the storm:

…the naming committee obviously barked at a very tall tree to come with that one, Cerberus being the mythological three-headed, dragon-tailed dog who guards the kingdom of the dead, allowing spirits to enter but never leave (Fowler 244).

Whether Cerberus blew in an ill wind or Nick’s fate simply caught up with him, is left a mystery. His boat, the Mattie Fiona, is found with no one aboard; his body is never recovered. As Mattie is the narrator of the tale, the reader is left to judge whether or not she could have rescued Nick from his seeming destiny. ( )