In her debut novel Waterwoman (Berkley), Lenore Hart offers a refreshing look at the dynamics of sisterhood, set against the raw life of growing up on a barrier island off Virginia between the two World Wars.

The story focuses on the life of young Annie Revels, the ugly duckling tomboy who would rather go out on the water with her fisherman father than stay at home with her mentally fragile mother and beautiful younger sister, Rebecca.

However, Annie's feministic character begins to surface when her father unexpectedly dies at sea and she must take care of her family.

Not only must Annie tend the garden, cook and clean because Rebecca prefers to entertain their mother, but she must also go out on the water to earn the family's living so she can care for her mother and sister, whom she describes as "oversized children I had suddenly birthed, innocent beyond reason and without a clue."

Annie breaks the taboo of women on the water, which her father always told her was dangerous: "Women and water? That's black gum against thunder." And Hart's use of the fisherman's vernacular makes the tone of the story all the more believable.

Some of the most striking elements of Waterwoman are the setting and the extensive familiarity with which Hart writes about the lives of the fishermen during this time period.

Hart, who lives off the shore of Virginia, creates a vivid world that initially could seem foreign to the average city-dwelling reader, as she describes in detail the difficult lives these fishermen and the women who love them deal with on a daily basis.

The scene where Annie sees her dead father is concrete: "He looked pale and slightly bloated. Smelled strong of seawater and fish, but certainly that was nothing new. The hardest thing was that his skin felt cold and rubbery beneath my fingers, but I set my teeth and squinted so I wouldn't have to look straight on at my father, who'd been killed by the water it seemed he sometimes loved more than us."

In the beginning, the details that Hart offers on how Annie learns how to comb the bay with trotlines, traps and tongs, have a tendency to slow the pace of the story, as well as having the potential to canonize Annie as some sort of martyr -- the woman who must do all.

However, Hart quickly steers clear of that path by molding Annie's character into a flawed young woman who is overly independent and resentful of her younger sister. The reader knows that Annie's thoughts and actions are not always of the most loving, sisterly nature but cannot help identifying and empathizing with her.

The real turning point in the plot line occurs when Nathan Combs, a handsome tour boat captain, enters Annie's life and changes her forever. But this is no soppy love story, quite the contrary. Just when the pace of the story appears to slacken, Hart throws in dramatic twists and turns that keep the reader voraciously turning the pages for more.

At times melodramatic yet also unassuming, Waterwoman is a tear-jerking and insightful story of a young woman who struggles to find her place in the world, while simultaneously trying to survive in it.