Fissures widen as the vexed questions of marriage and parenthood enter their private idyll, and Ms. Lucas captures their dissolution with the same heightened attention and clear expression: Grief emerges as love’s complement ... In the arc of this simple story, as with most of its insights, Thirst for Salt does not break any new ground, nor does it seek to. Its power is in the poignancy of recognition. It offers an honest, often beautiful reminder of the overwhelming emotions that all of us have felt but spend most of our daily lives trying to subdue.
Lucas’ rolling, gleaming, beguiling prose is saturated with desire, sensuous bliss, worry, fear, and anger as her narrator looks back at her mother’s life, her own childhood, and the highs and lows of her profoundly erotic, ultimately shipwrecked romance.
Intelligent ... There’s not much of a plot involving this well-trod story of a fractured love affair, but Lucas keenly captures the relationship’s slow erosion, as well as the narrator’s ability to make sense of her past while looking back on it. The author’s psychological acuity will keep readers piqued.
Lucas’ debut charts the tides of love, memory, and longing as it explores not why love ends but how it ebbs and flows ... Water imagery is everywhere, threatening to make the novel’s metaphors predictable ... While Lucas’ meditation on relationships is masterful, the ending falls flat—in a book where love leaves an indelible mark, it’s hard to believe that the final conflict sets its characters adrift. Though its metaphors are familiar, Lucas’ portrayal of love and desire exerts a wonderful pull.
