Fortune’s Rocks by Anita Shreve. Little, Brown: 464 pages. $24.95.

A historical romance about taboo love: what’s not to curl up with on a cold winter’s night? Yet Anita Shreve’s new novel, “Fortune’s Rocks,” breaks several rules that definitely work to destroy its potential as a page-turner. One, the reader should feel some form of identification with one party or other; two, sex scenes, if written properly, should not evoke an involuntary “eww” in the reader; and, three, the reader should not find herself over-identifying with the heroine’s strict parents, or with the hero’s jilted wife.

Shreve, author of the popular novel, “The Pilot’s Wife,” opens the story with Olympia, who is fifteen, and spending a summer, with her parents, on the New Hampshire coast. As the century turns, as the Victorian world becomes more progressive, and as Olympia’s womanhood dawns, it seems that anything is gloriously possible.

Olympia is beautiful, educated, cultured, articulate.

She is also infatuated with her father’s friend, Dr. John Haskell—a 41-year-old married doctor with children.

And he returns her attentions.

This unintentionally unromantic love story is truly hard to watch unfold. Shreve spends a good half of the novel on the two lovers’ search for places to be alone together. How romantic can it be when Haskell is Olympia’s lover and only confidant? The only girlfriends poor Olympia has are the ones she uses as .alibis. None of this is a problem for Shreve, though readers may feel a sense of relief when the two are finally caught (making love on the altar of the family chapel, at Olympia’s sweet 16 birthday party). Intervention—at last!

Shreve writes on, stopping occasionally to have Haskell express his guilt and remorse for becoming involved with a 16-year-old. Shreve also has Olympia continually remind the reader that the whole affair was practically her idea.

Is Haskell supposed to represent a Victorian girl’s only means to freedom? Her only way out of a life filled with orderly obedience? A means to be given her own life? Shreve gives no hint that this might be the case.

At any rate, the affair, coupled with its resulting pregnancy, grant Olympia freedom from her parents and from the life her father has meticulously planned for her. After her disastrous birthday party, she is confined to her room. Her baby is taken away from her, and she is sent to school at a female seminary. Thus begins the next phase of Olympia’s life, and the more interesting second half of the novel. Olympia’s bravery in the face of solitude and her eventual command of her own destiny make the second part of the novel gripping. She is caught up in political upheaval, eventually attaining a level of respect, and finally, a rather perfect life.

“Fortune’s Rocks” is essentially and almost charmingly, an old novel one might come upon in an attic, or a flea market—there is an authentic quaintness about much of it, and certainly, Shreve has worked hard to provide historical details—about social and class divisions, about medical care, about custom.

Shreve, in defense of her novel’s dubious love affair, might answer that young women commonly married older, established men in the last century. However, if Shreve could add sex scenes to what, in 1900, might have been a serial novel or a good melodrama, she most certainly could have updated the relationship itself for modern readers.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.