Pioneering feminist’s pilgrimage offers a birds-eye-view of the first-half of 20th century America (From Minot, Maine to North Hollywood; 1954 – 1956): Bravo to horsewoman Elizabeth Letts for living up to her reputation for impressive research skills, having won the PEN Center Literary Award for Research Nonfiction in 2017 for The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis. The same can be said of her 2011 debut The Eighty-Dollar Champion. For The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last Chance Journey Across America, Letts logged 10,000 research miles by car using “1950s vintage gas station maps” to trace, uncover, and piece together a death-defying 5,000 mile East-to-West coast daredevil saga, pulled off by one woman powered by an indefatigable horse and companion dog in the 1950s. The stuff of legends.

As a novelist (Finding Dorothy, the most recent), history comes alive through Letts’ appealing, novelistic prose. In the telling of the realization of an against-all-odds dream of reaching California’s “land of sunshine” from a remote Maine farm by horse that took over a year, the book becomes more than one woman’s extraordinary tale to social and cultural commentary of an America at the cusp of sweeping changes.

Letts visited historical societies in small towns across America digging up fascinating details that put context, humanity, and history into this life-affirming book that speaks volumes about the bond between horses, dogs, and humans, and a can-do spirit at an historical time when Americans weren’t so fearful, distrustful of strangers. The three vagabonds they opened their farms, barns, homes, ranches, and jail cells to are:

  • Annie Wilkins: 62-year-old Maine single farmer diagnosed with TB expected to live only two to four years. Hadn’t stepped foot outside the state, except briefly as a child. Embodies Maine’s independent spirit.
  • Tarzan: Morgan horse Annie rescued. Known for being “reliable, loyal, tireless, and versatile.” Purchased with the little money Annie made from the sale of her family’s farm she inherited during the Great Depression.
  • Depeche Toi: French-Canadian named, Dachshund mix.

Annie’s mother put the California fantasy into her head as a child regaling her with optimistic stories, an escape from the hard life of a Maine farm that saw its productivity dwindled to a bare-minimum. It took more than courage and foolhardiness to set off on a horse you hadn’t gotten to know, let alone ride one in over thirty years. But that’s what Annie did. With her life expectancy in the balance and an adamant refusal to be a burden to the state or anyone, Annie unknowingly bought the perfect horse. With one hand on the saddle and the other holding a rope tethered to her low-lying, energetic little dog running alongside Tarzan and Annie atop, this threesome became a formidable “team.” “Clip-clopping” at the pace of three to four miles an hour, they shared newly constructed turnpikes (and backroads) with cars and trucks whizzing by when a “single older woman without family or employment faced few and stark choices.” And yet, Annie found one.

Dressed like a man wearing four layers of clothing gave her some protection, but her health was still seriously compromised. Without knowing from day to day where they’d all sleep, how they’d eat, or what was ahead, Letts charts this herculean feat, state by state.

Blessed with the “love, loyalty” of “four-footed guides,” Annie had one other crucial thing going for her she never expected and we’re treated to: an amazing string of “kindness and generosity” by strangers who soon learned of the intrepid travelers, seeing them through the windows of their newfound love affair with the automobile. The year 1954 “was a banner year,” Letts annotates. “That year, the average price of a car was $1,700 . . . In contrast the equine population plunged drastically in the same decade.” Annie’s America was “quickly moving from agrarian and rural to urban and suburban.”

It took months for Annie and her two unflagging animals to make their way into Kentucky horse country. From there, they traveled into Tennessee and Arkansas, no further south. Notable because of the absence of Annie’s meeting anyone of color. Letts is mindful of that, reminding us that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t passed until 1964, expanded in ’68, concluding: “Annie must have known that in the 1950s, Black travelers would not have been so welcome everywhere.” 

It didn’t take long for news of this strikingly odd crew to spread, after a reporter discovered them. From local newspapers to the AP newswire, Annie and her animals gained notoriety. Annie, though, wasn’t the type to seek fame. Treating everyone the same is one reason we become so fond of her.

This lonely woman didn’t feel alone with her devoted horse and dog by her side, but her dazzling storytelling had a snowball effect surrounding them with people as they were invited and cheered on at county fairs, town parades, and the “biggest rodeo in America.” Sheriffs, police, and citizens looked out for her and her companions. She meets Andrew Wyeth, the painter. Veterinarians replace Tarzan’s constantly worn-down shoes. Passionate “horse people” provided food and shelter for the trio; some invited all to stay as long as Annie wanted. She meets widows like Mrs. Casey Jones of railroad lore, and widowers who see how exceptional she is like an 80-year-old Wyoming rancher who asked her to marry him. Tempting but not desirable after two ex’s abandoned her to deal with the worthless farm, the dream far more important “than any man.” Even when sought out as a contestant on Art Linkletter’s long-running TV show, People Are Funny, Annie took celebrity in stride.

Stardom did help her. An empathetic soul gave her the idea to sell postcards she autographed, tiding her over.

The reader isn’t the only one who feels nostalgic for Main Streets, “F. W. Woolworth’s five-and-dime” stores, drugstores equipped with soda fountains. “In the early part of the twentieth century, there was an upsurge in nostalgia about America’s pioneer past,” Letts affirms. “In 1955, her story ratcheted deep into the American psyche: her life alone on a small farm, her horse, her dog, her fearlessness and determination.” It’s uplifting when anyone discovers the freedom to choose their destiny.

Weather, though, was a formidable foe acting like a character wreaking havoc, resonating today when extremes of climate can no longer take a back seat. For months, they journeyed in wintery conditions – hazardous icy pavements for the walkers and drenched clothing for the older woman with weak lungs – and still they overcame a litany of mishaps and setbacks.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” is one of the meaningful quotes serving as epigraphs above chapters. In Wyoming, it’s said another way: “That cowboy who rides off alone in the sunset? He wasn’t alone. He was on horseback. And that is what it is to be a rider. Your best friend is always with you.”

Bravo to the horsewoman, historian, novelist, and nonfiction pro.

Lorraine

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Rom-Com at its best (Houston, Texas and TX ranch; present-day): Up for a literary game? The creator is Katherine Center, who’s been called “the reigning queen of comfort reads”. Her ninth, quick-witted, romantic feel-good novel certainly attests to that pleasurable characterization.

The game: To guess what kind of job Center’s newest leading lady Hannah Brooks has? Hannah calls it “elite.” The leading man, the Sexiest Man Alive actor Jack Stapleton at over six feet tall says it’s “the scariest job of anybody I know.” The “job is not about violence, it’s about avoiding violence.”

Need a few more hints? Hannah’s a pro at “going unnoticed,” yet she’s unable to sit still even when the novel opens when her mother has just died. For once, her demanding boss Glenn Schultz tells her to take some time off to grieve. But the workaholic who hasn’t taken a vacation since she started the job eight years ago balks. “I can’t just sit here – and . . . marinate in all my misery,” she pleads, which includes her ex- breaking up with her hours after the funeral. She’ll take any assignment Glenn wants to send her on, such as the three-week one to Korea. Ambitious, her eyes are focused on a promotion to head up the new office in London; her competition none other than her ex. The only friend she seems to have is also a co-worker, but she’s just returned from two-timing her on a three-week assignment in Madrid with her heartless ex. The betrayals, arrows to her heart. As for the grief, “Does that ever really go away?” Global trotting is the best perk of her job: her means of escaping Houston, Texas, where the author also lives. Hannah’s definition of escape, though, isn’t likely yours. Travel to exotic places like Costa Rica is one thing but a hostage situation in Iraq quite another.

No one said the game was straightforward. But you’ve guessed already, haven’t you? You double-checked the title! Yes, Hannah is The Bodyguard but given the rich clients she protects, a perfect game score would be Executive Protection Agent.

For all the negative reactions we have towards the harsh way Glenn treats his best agent, we’ve got to hand it to him for plucking Hannah away from the FBI after testing “off the charts on conscientiousness, pattern recognition, observational skills, listening retention, and altruism.” Hannah fits the profile of “much more about brains than brawn.” And yet, she has a low-opinion of herself, her appearance, and whether she’s even “loveable.”

Judging by the cover art, Hannah’s self-image may be distorted. Doesn’t she look cute in those red cowboy boots and hot pink fringed dress? Not her normal or comfortable attire, but she’s glamorized as much as she’ll agree to (Glenn wants her to go all out on beautification), because guess who’s her new client? Balking more, the cover accurately depicts Hannah facing away from the “blindingly” handsome “megastar” Glenn assigns her to protect, relenting to her need to stay in “motion” but only as far as Texas. Jack is so head-spinning gorgeous, Hannah finds him “exhausting” to be around. Precisely what she’ll be doing since the assignment is to hang out at his family’s Texas ranch to save him from crazed fans. Like Hannah, Jack balks at needing surveillance.

Jack looks different than pictured on the cover. Taller than Hannah, “wearing aviator sunglasses like he was born in them,” he’s the last person to dress formally when he’s not acting, especially staying on his family’s cattle ranch spreading 500 acres. The Hacienda Architecture described as a “1920s Spanish-style hacienda with a red tile roof and pink bougainvillea blossoming everywhere,” feels authentic. It is. Katherine Center’s parents own this ranch:

It only takes Center twenty-some pages to set Hannah up as the underdog who must accept her tasking if she wants to stay in the running for the London job. The backdrop of how Hannah and Jack end up spending lots of time together is based on three sorrowful circumstances: Hannah’s grief; the catalyst for the “superstar who has a heart-melting smile” to return home after ten years (his mother has been diagnosed with cancer); and a closely-held secret that’s left Jack estranged from his older brother Drew who never left the ranch (the tension between them thick as glue). And yet, The Bodyguard is chock-full of clever, humorous, and flirtatious one liners that bring loads of smiles, laughter, a belly-laugh or two. The warmth of the romantic chemistry developing between two dramatically different leading stars comes across as effortless, while other lines pose heart-to-heart reflection. Particularly when it comes to love, risks, choices, destiny. “How does anybody just ever assume they’d be somebody else’s first choice?” 

The 1-2-3 punchlines are relentless. How does the author keep zinging it? When Jack acquiesces to Hannah’s mission, he tells her how it’s going to work: she’ll need to pretend she’s Jack’s girlfriend, otherwise his mother will be upset about her presence. By now you can guess how thrilled Hannah was with that idea. Here’s a sample of Jack and Hannah discussing the arrangement:

Jack: “How do you feeling about me touching you?”

Hannah: “What kind of touching are we talking about?”

Jack: “Well, the way I am around girlfriends . . . I’d say that I tend to touch them a lot. You know. If you’re into someone, you just want to be touching them.”

Jack, by the way, is featured on social media with his newest girlfriend, a stunning blonde. Despite that, your romantic dreaming takes over when so-called “ordinary” girl is forced to live with an actor even Hannah admits “made us all love him – and humanity – just a little bit more.” Later, after the two are play acting at the ranch on display for Jack’s lovely, long-happily married parents to see and enjoy (brother Drew still brooding), Jack tells Hannah how he fakes kisses in the movies. Beyond flabbergasted, she cannot imagine the kiss she swooned over wasn’t real. He’s kissed a lot of women, he tells her. “A good kiss eclipses everything else,” she’s thinking. “Everything except touch and longing and each other.” Center has come up with a creative angle on the Fake versus Real phenomenon.

Although Hannah is a consummate professional, trained in vigilance, we read-between-the-lines of the whip-smart repartee, sensing, feeling, something’s definitely brewing between them. How to know it’s real? For her, and from him? Chapters start off with funny, you-bet-you-can-say that quips like “A LOT TO process here.”

Hannah wonders whether movie stars were meant “to be fantasies for the rest of us? To add imaginary sprinkles on the metaphorical cupcake of life?” Or, is something else happening between the “unlovable” woman and the famous star nearly everyone loves?

Note the word nearly. Because Hannah has her work cut out for her in more ways than one.

Lorraine

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A fantastical, fanatical escape from reality (nameless town and mountain retreat 100 miles away; present-day and replica of a late 1970s setting): If you had all the money in the world, what would you do with it?

Thirty-six-year-old Bonnie Lincoln, who lives alone in a trailer park, has “longed for something more, something extraordinary.” So when she wins a jackpot lottery, she knows exactly how she’ll spend it.

At long last, through sheer luck, Bonnie’s fantasy to transform her life and adopt a new identity has come true. A random event breaks the luckless cycle of her life. For someone who’s wondered “What decides a life?” and what “determines one’s identity?”, finally she has the power to control the answers to those fundamental life questions.

What’s her fantasy? “To crawl into Three’s Company and live there” – literally. Obsessed with the hugely popular, influential sitcom that aired on ABC for eight years, from 1977 to 1984, Bonnie actually wants to recreate the set and assume the identities of the three starring roommates of the show, all comedians:

  • Handsome, charming, clumsy John Ritter who played Jack Tripper, and shocked fans when he died suddenly at 54;
  • Sexy Suzanne Somers who played the stereotypical dumb blond-bombshell Chrissy Snow; and 
  • Cute, dark-haired bobbed Joyce Dewitt as Janet Wood, the most practical of the bunch.
Via Jim Ellwanger on Flickr [CC BY-NC 2.0]

(You can watch the show for free on Pluto TV.)

The utterly imaginative plot of terribly lonesome Bonnie wanting to wrap herself up in the nostalgia of a mad cap comedy featuring three single, good-natured, and good-humored friends is an awfully appealing plot. For about a third of the novel, it absurdly is.

Ashley Hutson makes her splashing debut in what turns out to be an emotional and psychological tsunami – the last third of the novel. The middle third is the transition from Bonnie’s small, downtrodden world to an artificial, fake reality. Hutson may have watched all 170+ episodes of the TV show to so meticulously depict, down to every minute detail, Apartment 201 where Jack, Chrissy, and Janet lived together (and more), to have enabled Bonnie to slip into a surreal world she funded and had built, replicated with off-the-charts authenticity to allow her to forget her reality.

It’s hard to pinpoint when Bonnie crosses the line from starry-eyed, nonsensical to eccentric to crazed, because her descent doesn’t happen overnight and Hutson moves us back-and-forth in time and place so we’re not focused on her losing touch with reality compared to entertaining us with clever prose and impressive details that seduce us. By the time we realize what’s going on, that the enchanted plot gets darker and darker, that talented Hutson has a more complicated literary mindset than the light-hearted, humorous one we thought we were reading, we’re hooked, riveted, no turning back.

So, this review comes with a warning. Given all that Bonnie has lost, which we learn early on, it seemed perfectly reasonable she’d find a healthy escape from her traumatic life by binge-watching a wonderfully funny and cheerful TV show that let her escape from the unrelenting boredom of spending twelve years of her life working at a mom-and-pop store that could be anywhere in small-town America. We’re glad to see Bonnie has moved on from two traumatic losses early in her life: the death of both of her parents, each to self-destructive behaviors, one after another.

Bonnie doesn’t have any siblings. Her childhood friend Krystal is like the sister she’s never had, loyal and caring, whereas Bonnie is aware she vacillates in “passive aggression” towards the only friend she has. It’s Bonnie’s parents who own the grocery mart she works at, having felt feeling sorry for her plight in life, going further, welcoming her into their family that includes Krystal’s brother. Descriptions of their Christmas celebrations all together are the dreamy Hallmark kind, complete with a “Christmas village” and all the holiday trimmings. Bonnie now has a happy family to love, unlike hers, until tragedy strikes again. In the aftermath, Bonnie keeps pushing Krystal away. At what point does Bonnie stop trusting anyone?

Bonnie is more troubled than we thought. Hutson does a brilliant job depicting the disintegration of her fragile, traumatized, mental state. The accumulation of grief, loneliness, insecurity, and longing rages underneath. We bear witness to Bonnie’s unraveling into madness. Even so, we’re caught off guard at how far gone she is.

Hutson is after a larger message than what happens to the deeply disturbed character she’s created. She’s reflecting what’s happening in America: disintegration as it relates to the mental health crisis and the surge in violence. This is fiction that tells us is we cannot fix deep-seated societal problems without understanding the depths from where they come. Although the novel turns out to be so different than expected, Hutson has her pulse on this phenomenon. 

In an interview, the author sums up how her novel went from humorous to depressing:

“Humor both tempers and reinforces despair. Humor is something that should lift us up, but when it turns to cynicism about our reality it often puts us back down lower than where we started.” 

Another interview enlightens us more. “I like being disturbed,” she says when asked about her reading preferences. In accomplishing what the author set out to do, she disturbs us for a higher purpose: to provoke us so we can ponder how we might contribute to altering the trajectory that’s been defining and disturbing America. We feel sad because what’s happening in fiction is imitating the unspeakable sadness of countless people feeling left out, abandoned, helpless, and scared so they end up resorting to violent acts against themselves, their families, and strangers, young and old. Bonnie didn’t feel safe anywhere so she went about creating a self-enclosed bunker of sorts where no one could hurt her, nor find her. Even Krystal has no idea what she’s been planning, or where.

To make the impossible possible, Bonnie stealthily contracts a lawyer and fifty-men to construct her fantasy in the mountains, also in an undisclosed location. The hoops she makes people go through to execute her wild plans and the way she treats them, the kinder getting the worst treatment, is harsh, cruel. Despite knowing how far people will go for money, it still amazes and pains us.

Although Bonnie has been through a lot to no fault of her own, we’ve lost our empathy for her. We don’t have to like a character to recognize the potency of her invention. We don’t have to like her in the same way we don’t like what’s happening in America to Americans, but we ought to care and recognize how far off we’ve come from our “better angels.”

Bonnie’s story could be set almost anywhere, although the setting feels more eastern mountains than western. Perhaps because the author lives in Maryland and it doesn’t feel anywhere near Santa Monica, where Three’s Company was filmed.

When does trauma and despair cross into a mental disorder? As Bonnie’s fury against humanity deepens, we’re diagnosing her. Schizophrenia? Multiple personality disorder? Post-traumatic disorder? All the reader knows is that she’s become seriously unhinged.

Bonnie Franklin is one of the most distrustful, fearful, disturbed, and loneliest characters we’ve met fictionally. Well, at least reviewed here.

Lorraine

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What happens to traumatized people years after their catastrophic stories were reported on TV news? (NJ/NYC beat & New Orleans; 2000 to 2021): More After The Break reads like a riveting and emotionally stirring collection of short stories. Except these stories are so real you wish they were fiction.

Of the “ten thousand” people Emmy-award winning journalist Jen Maxfield interviewed for TV, chosen from “four thousand stories” spanning twenty-two years, ten are revisited in this compassionate, groundbreaking book. Each breathtaking, and delicate in reaching out to people she’d been thrown-together with amidst horrific circumstances.

How many reporters dare to re-open doors not knowing what “chaos and sadness” they might be stepping back into? “We dip our toes in the pool of your grief but never jump in for fear of drowning.”

Maxfield’s commitment to the highest ideals of journalism shines, so it’s not surprising she now teaches broadcast journalism at her alma mater, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Keenly aware the afflicted person at the center of the story always comes first, despite the rush to get the story, the author’s warmth, honesty, respectfulness, and graciousness offers comfort to the darkness. Humbly though, she asks: “What can I offer”? Answering with, “The space to tell their story.”

Tracking down people met in crisis years ago is the easy part thanks to technology she says, but there’s nothing easy about these stories. The reward, which the reader perceives, is that she “could not have predicted how much these reunions would enrich my life with joy and optimism.”

Maxfield’s gratitude is also refreshing. Grateful for the extraordinary “emotional intimacy within minutes” granted whenever interviewing/intruding on someone in his/her most vulnerable, naked state; the cameramen (no female photographers in these stories) who stood beside her so she never felt “alone”; and being cocooned in the “live truck” with her crew preparing to transition from reality into the surreal.

How does a journalist find balance in their life stepping outside their world to the unknown abyss? For Maxfield that means getting the urgent call, having to drop everything to race out the door, leaving her family – husband and three children, young during her coverage of these stories – to be consumed by nightmare stories working up to sixteen hours a day. These ten stories are staggering in terms of human trauma, which makes the idea for and realization of this book high-stakes and notable.

More After The Break comes at a crucial time when the public’s trust in the media has reached alarmingly low rates. If only wide readership of this book could reverse the trend, by witnessing serious journalists/reporters/anchors do their upmost to maintain the principles and ethics of the Fourth Estate.

Maxfield wonders whether the people she contacts will even remember her. Although trauma can wipe out memories, we understand why no one forgets the genuinely empathetic newswoman.

Having cut her teeth at two local upstate New York TV stations, Maxfield worked at Eyewitness News on ABC7 New York for ten years; since 2013 she’s covered the news for NBC4New York. Her real start she describes came in graduate school, making a documentary for her thesis. This story saved for the last, perhaps to sum up two decades worth of lessons learned.

Bergen County, New Jersey is the author’s home. So while she covers local and NYC news stories, one is included reliving being called upon to cover Hurricane Katrina a day after it devastated Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Twenty-eight at the time, it was the most “high profiled” and “massive” story of her career. It shatters any notions you might have that TV news reporting during catastrophes is to be envied. Lives are reduced to the absolute minimum of basic needs – drinking water, coffee, bathrooms, and gas for the vehicle. Still, enviable compared to the disaster.

“TV news reporting is not a glamourous job, but its purpose is lofty. Spotlighting the people who represent the best in human nature helps our viewers see beyond the despair of the situation, and it gives us all hope.”

Perhaps another journalist could have written this book as beautifully. But not with the same sensitive and compassionate prose reflecting Maxfield’s laudatory approach to her profession.

We don’t know the people in these stories. Nor the disasters that hit them, with the exception of Hurricane Katrina and perhaps the “60,000-pound ferry” that crashed into a Staten Island pier. “Angel on the Ferry” opens the collection, maybe because it’s the most awe-inspiring, though there’s plenty of competition. The victim interviewed was twenty-four at the time, a NYC waiter who didn’t earn much money on his way home. Also interviewed was the heroine nurse who saved his life, opportunely vacationing from Wales. Could Maxfield have been as courageous? she reflects. It does take a different type of courage to re-enter Paul Esposito’s life, not knowing what kind of physical and mental condition she’d find him in after losing both of his legs. His words and mental attitude, like the book’s title, are unforgettable. “The ferry crash was the start of a new chapter” he says, in which he “takes nothing for granted and savors the beauty of every day.” Is this the definition of Grace?

“A Daughter’s Love” is a survival story on two fronts that will take your breath away. How did Tamika Tompkins, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, one a newborn, survive being stabbed twenty-seven-times (!) by her ex-boyfriend? Wait, there’s more! How did her two-year-old daughter have the wherewithal to jump on top of her bleeding mother stopping her from bleeding to death? Stunning what even the very youngest of children are capable of. A stark warning that adults need to pay closer attention to what they say and how they behave in front of their impressionable kids who hear and observe far more than they’re given credit for.

The “Friday Night” story about a twenty-three-year-old animal lover Tiffany is achingly sad. Her life cut short by an intoxicated hit-and-run driver while she was trying to save a dog lying in the street also hit by a car. Sadness turns to outrage when we learn how just justice is. If the perpetrator had moral convictions – stayed at the scene of the crime as legally required – a jury would likely have found him drunk and guilty, imprisoned for maybe as much as twenty years (NJ law). But who can prove how much alcohol is in your system when you’ve run away? Seven years in jail for erasing a life is an indignation, but what do you call getting out of prison on parole in six months?

Obviously, there’s more stories in this moving collection. Each strike at the randomness and fairness of life. And, how some people do care deeply about that.

Lorraine

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How one woman tells us so much about Freedom, Feminism, and Environmental Stewardship (Fellowship Point, imaginary haven on the coast of Maine. Also Philadelphia and NYC’s Village, 2000 – 2008; backstory early 1960s): Fellowship Point reads and feels like a literary masterpiece. One of the most satisfying novels I’ve ever read.

Elegantly written with such welcoming prose and soothing broad-mindedness, nearing 600 pages and you’ll still wish it never ends. Because you’ll lose yourself in, dwell in, the highly-principled and independent world of eighty-year-old Agnes Lee.

Envisioned twenty-years ago, ten years in the writing, Alice Elliott Dark couldn’t have imagined how much her bighearted feminist novel – entwined with her best friend Polly she grew up with in Philadelphia, also eighty – would mean to so many of us when a woman’s freedom to choose the direction of her life has been torn asunder. Although Agnes will swear, “I never realized I was a feminist. I realized I was a person, a human being, with desires and needs and talents and abilities – the same as everyone else.”

The thing is Agnes isn’t like everyone else. A contrarian who marches to her own beat, she might intimidate you at first, until you get to know her and are struck by how deeply she cares about the existential things in life; her friendships, never wanting to “lose sight of the good people;” and the beauty and bounty of Nature – her “serenity.” Dark wants us to know Agnes as well as she does. The wholly unorthodox Aunt we wish we had, or if you’re really lucky, cherish.

As a fourth-generation Quaker from the city of Liberty and Love, Dark’s second novel is a literary work of art, embodying the spiritual values of a movement that believes in Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. Agnes lives and breathes this moral code and philosophy without being religious at all. Hear these values described below:

“What makes you happy?” “What is free will?” “Or freedom?” “Or will?” “What is a soul mate?” we’re asked. So when Agnes wonders, “Who cares about an old lady?” you’ll want to shout out that you do! She has so much to tell us about how to live your life on your terms. How to celebrate the complexities of life with all the grace and dignity you can muster. To care about “making the world kinder.” To be honest with yourself and the actions of others. How to survive unbearable sorrow. To not give up even when the odds seem hopeless. To value “sticking up for yourself,” and others. To give and love as much as you can but not expect the same in return, although if reciprocated, maybe not the way you expected, it’s still beautiful.

Agnes and Polly have chosen very different destinies mostly because their personalities are very different. Agnes chose singlehood; Polly marriage, motherhood, and now reaping the joys of grandparenthood. Polly knows Agnes doesn’t care much for her self-absorbed husband, Dick, and how Polly is so “cowed” to him. Agnes tells it right. You won’t like him either. Nor her eldest of three sons, James, an investment banker, who presents a significant roadblock to the environmental cause, activism, and sensitivities Agnes’ possesses and pays homage to.

For 150 years, her ancestors managed to protect a fictional spit of land on the coast of Maine named Fellowship Point. A “hallowed thirty-five acre tip on the peninsula” nicknamed the Sank, short for Sanctuary. Preserved by a fellowship of five friends and their families, today it’s in grave jeopardy as not all five current members have the same conservancy agenda. Agnes is dogged in this pursuit, but Polly is torn between her allegiance to her and her three children. 

Agnes epitomizes the best of what it means to fully embrace a “personal religion of sisterhood with trees, flowers, birds, squirrels, rocks, and even snakes.” A laudatory theme about caring for the environment like we should care about people.

The other threat is ageist attitudes towards Polly by her children, and Agnes’ diagnosis of cancer, which we learn of early on. Do not assume Agnes’ fate is sealed because she has a lot of living to do! When she asks, “How do you achieve enlightenment?” she’s letting us know she’s far more enlightened than most of us. Her tale of all-embracing fellowship shows the “upsides and downsides” of how she achieved that. 

Agnes celebrates the best we can be even if our lives turned out not to be as we hoped. “What are you grateful for?” she asks. She’s “grateful for another day, for writing and for the sea.” A beloved children’s author of the When Nan series. When another female character enters her self-determined life early on in the novel, a persistent one who doesn’t give up – twenty-seven-year-old editorial assistant Maud Silver who works at the publishing house that’s produced “dozens” of the When Nan books – she’s curious who Nan is and how she understands children so well when she’s never had a child of her own. As Nan’s profoundly moving story rolls out, along with the charming, developing relationship between young and old, we see the dramatic meaning of sisterhood and motherhood.

Agnes isn’t afraid to speak her mind yet she’s kept some secrets even from Polly, despite not being able to “quantify” how much Polly’s friendship has meant to her over the course of her life. There’s other meaningful female relationships too: Agnes’ younger sister, Elspeth, whom we meet through her loving diary-like letters and notebooks, diverting from the 3rd person narrative; and her loyal, long-time, gatekeeper/housekeeper Sylvie. (The Lees were wealthy but it was “bad manners” to be showy). Agnes also has male relationships that matter too, some heartening, heartbreaking, and vexing.

Opening with a handy imaginary map of the Maine coastal area, on the west side you’ll see Agnes’ Leeward Cottage, Polly’s Meadowlea next door, and a shared graveyard that keeps the spirits of those they’ve loved and lost near. Archie Lee, Agnes’ cousin, lives south of Polly at Westerlee with his wife who offends Agnes’ values. They also own a flamboyant mansion on the eastern side, Easterlee, which overuses the region’s distinctive granite rock with pink coloring. This dislikable duo commit and enable a terrible injustice towards Agnes and Polly’s mutual friend Richard Circumstance, who they defend staunchly.

Armchair atmospheric, this is the “boom of the ocean” Maine, with its “mossy forest floor, the dun-colored needles, the expressive tree bark, this slowed-down world.” The place where Agnes “felt – free.” Freedom is what Agnes exemplifies.

Caring for both the land and the Abenaki Indigenous tribe who settled on it before anyone else, the Maine Coast Heritage Trust is cited since it represents the preservation vision Agnes has for Fellowship Point. An environmental activist’s message from an author who spent summers in Maine. 

Agnes is also the one who brings us so much nostalgia. She affects us when she asks why girls who “giggled” and felt “blasts of joy” ceased “playing and running?” when “we loved it so much.”

Like Maine, Fellowship Point is a state of mind. Agnes’ state of mind will live in our hearts and minds for a long time. That’s why this novel is a masterpiece.

Lorraine

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