The staying power of a passion for the natural world and science through generations of fictional characters and common themes (Upstate New York & an island off of Maine and New Hampshire; 1860s – 2018): “There were some advantages of being a writer of histories,” wrote Willa Cather in The Professor’s House. Andrea Barrett chose that quote to frame her new collection of six short stories, Natural History: Stories. Demonstrating she too is a writer of histories. Intricate ones.

History from multiple perspectives. Barrett’s literary history includes recognition with MacArthur, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships; finalist for the Pulitzer-Prize; and winning the National Book Award for Ship Fever, a short story collection published in 1996 that’s also being re-released along with this collection. Personally, she once wanted to be a scientist, so she’s channeled her passion for “scientific inquiry” and the natural world into her storytelling.

History also seen through generations of fictional characters and themes connected to each other in this new collection (Barrett acknowledges not all the stories are brand new, but they’ve been newly adapted), as well as to Barrett’s earlier short stories and novels (see: https://www.andrea-barrett.com/biography). A compelling, complex concept of endurance, weaving together a rich body of work in new and altered ways.

This review is based solely on this new collection. Coming to Barrett fresh, having not read anything else she’s written, means Natural History can be read as a standalone. For new readers, a marvelous revelation when you figure out the commonalities. The aha moments take time to realize, whereas familiar readers will surely pick up on and be looking for the artful connections to previous books much sooner.

In Natural History, history is seen through characters, relationships, attachment to a place, and thematically, connecting fictional family histories spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. History is also part of the stories. Barrett is deft at mixing real and imaginary. She also emphasizes the importance of documenting history in terms of how life was experienced at a particular time.

In the cleverly crafted first story, “Wonders of the Shore,” Barrett has imbued her primary female protagonist – Miss Henrietta Atkins born in 1852 – with a lifelong dedication to biology as a high school biology teacher. You’ll read of former students who never forgot her. We know what that feels like, remembering a favorite teacher who made a difference in our lives. In Henrietta’s case, it’s appreciating the wonders of the natural world.

Opening with wondrous prose on the wonderment of the sea, Barrett sets the eloquent tone and intricate theme of the past and present converging:

“The sea-shore, with its stretches of sandy beach and rocks, seems, at first, nothing but a barren waste, merely the natural barrier of the ocean. But to the observant eye these apparently desolate reaches are not only teeming with life, they are also replete with suggestions of the past. They are the pages of history full of fascination for one who has learned to read them.”

Inviting us to read with an “observant eye,” it’s still easy to miss the subtle slipping in of the name of Henrietta’s relative, Rose Marburg. For those who haven’t read “The Marburg Sisters,” a 1994 story referred to in the author’s note, when we meet up with Rose again in the last story bearing the name of the collection, it hits us how skillfully the generational threads are pulled together. To make sure we don’t miss that, like the author apparently did in her 2007 novel The Air We Breathe in which she includes a genealogical family tree to stress how characters are linked to Ship Fever, she’s done the same for this new collection. A two-page, multi-family genealogical tree comes at the end to surprise, confirm, and clarify.

In the opening story, Henrietta’s closest friend, Miss Daphne Bannister, has invited her to spend a few summer weeks on Appledore Island. For those who know New England places, the island isn’t familiar so we think it’s fictional. Googling you’ll learn its real, located on the Isles of Shoals Archipelago.

Daphne is also a scientist, a wildlife expert on insects, wildflowers, plants, birds. She writes technical guidebooks and other nonfiction, one the title of the story supposedly published in 1889. Googling it appears not to exist. Yet another book cited, An Island Garden published around the same time, is real! Barrett teases and challenges. Continuing with the cottage the two women are staying at. Owned by Celia Thaxter, who was a poet and lived in a cottage with a lovely garden on property alongside what was then the Appledore House Hotel. Other guests in the story, friends of Celia’s, were historical figures who frequented this island artistic haven, to include painters William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam; and writers and poets National Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning. Turns out Hassam actually illustrated Celia’s garden book with the recognizable painting “Celia Thaxter in Her Garden.”

Celia Thaxter in Her Garden, by Childe Hassam
via Manchester City Library on Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

The relationship between Henrietta and Daphne, both of whom chose singlehood, delicately raises the question as to whether their relationship was more than meets the eye since they’ve been vacationing together for many summers. The stronger impression, though, is of a professional, scientific relationship in which Daphne is seen as the overly ambitious one and Henrietta the kinder, warmer one. This judgment intensifies in the last, most recent story (2018) when Barrett makes the larger point (beyond women choosing marriage, motherhood, or singlehood) that women have made great scientific strides when they “find each other,” “stuck together,” and “made friends.”

Henrietta is featured in all the stories in one way or another. The setting changes to Upstate New York, where Henrietta lives. A common setting for the author who also lives in this region of the country.

Henrietta is selflessly devoted to others, whether it be to exemplifying how noble teaching as a profession is to nurturing curious young minds, or more broadly to the sacrifices women make as nurturers. Henrietta has been caring for her beloved sister Hester’s five children, all girls, over the years. Very involved with them, while Daphne is involved with herself. We greatly admire Henrietta; the jury has been out on Daphne early on when she treated Henrietta as second fiddle at Celia’s cottage. Female friendships are complicated and take work, seen in the closing story when Daphne appears at seventy-five and is still some part of Henrietta’s world.

In the second, poignant Regimental story Henrietta is ten, so the chronology isn’t straightforward. She’s working for a family that runs a pottery business. The husband has asked her to write letters to his two brothers, volunteers in the Union Army. Their regiment is stationed in northern Virginia, where many Civil War battles were fought. Again, unfamiliar history is woven in citing the use of observation balloons for reconnaissance. There actually was a Balloon Corps in the Civil War. But it’s the history of “hydro-aeroplanes,” a “dirigible engine,” in WWI and later the Hindenburg Disaster we know of. Interestingly, aviation appears in the fourth story “The Accident,” involving one of Henrietta’s nieces Caroline, another woman who chooses an unconventional career.

The other two stories, “Henrietta and her Moths” and “Open House,” deepen and enlarge interconnected themes on the natural world, science, and personal histories.

In writing about real history, Barrett shows the benefits and drawbacks of in-the-moment impressions when raw versus reflecting later within the larger context of history when memories over time can become “compressed and expanded.”

Warning about “stories tangled together,” these masterfully tangled stories will keep readers on their toes.

Lorraine

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The realities of an America for all (US states in the South, also the Bahamas and Cuba; past and present): “Race remains the most dramatic light switch of the country,” says African American Studies Hughes-Rogers Professor at Princeton University Imani Perry. A “vicious undertow” of what’s happened and happening throughout America – not just relegated to the South, she forcefully argues. Intended to be a lightning rod, in her eloquence, Perry doesn’t mince words.

Impassioned and superbly informed, after reading Perry’s South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation, reaching across and interconnecting disciplines, genres, events, and travels, you’ll see why it’s been nominated for the National Book Award for Nonfiction for 2022. (Winner announced November 16th.)

Photo by Jimmy Emerson, DVM on Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Perry’s sixth nonfiction book is a call to action from the biracial daughter of parents who were both civil rights activists in Alabama, the State she’s deeply rooted to as she was born in Birmingham and five generations of her ancestors were slaves. Perry’s words, research, and historical/memoirist/cultural/sociological/political/and travel commentaries exalt black achievements and splendor while deploring institutional racism that rips at the idealized Soul of America. By inviting us on her journey through the “South,” she wants us to see more clearly the origins, history, and culture of racism in order to recognize and accept racism as having no boundaries. Hers is a “critical eye” telling hard, “ugly truths” but to make real progress we cannot afford to look away. Perry takes a deep dive into the anguish and “shame” of race, slavery, wealth/power, and White Supremacy.

Not everything is gut-searing. There’s beauty in achievements overcome; her love of family and traditions; her infectious joy for Black artistry – musicians, dancers, painters, quilters, writers; and her pride in “stately and unflinching” HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) as a “gathering place, one of those precious ones, for Black people, American and beyond,” wanting us to know that Black people from the South are highly-educated if given the opportunity. Perry exemplifies that with three university degrees, two Ivy-league, including a law degree from Harvard.

This book is full of soul.

Organized as a travel journey from the North where Perry lives and works, she winds her way state-by-state through America’s South, creating an unusual travel guide of sorts. Within chapters and paragraphs, stories are told from multiple perspectives. Her insight, impressions, conversations, and anecdotes often read as poignant essays.

How do you define America’s soul? In terms of fighting for justice and freedoms, Perry’s conceptualization echoes President Biden’s campaign to “restore the soul of America,” inspired by Presidential historian Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels, who was inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s “The Better Angels of our Nature,” inaugural speech.

Yet Perry’s Soul doesn’t have the same meaning when “race is at the heart of the South” and also “at the heart of the nation.” “There is no resolution of unjust relations without a structural and ethical change,” she argues. Advocating for transformative change, Perry recognizes “moments of transcendence,” but fiercely calls out false thinking that “possibility” can be realized if we continue to regard racial injustices, inequalities, as the South’s problem not America’s.

Perry is rightfully proud of the civil rights organizing accomplishments by both her black mother from the South and her White, Jewish “father who raised me” from the North. He came down to Alabama to be a force to move America to a better place. It’s an example of how the personal mixes with the historical and cultural as Perry points out White and Black Southerners ignited the civil rights movement. SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee we associate most famously with the March on Washington, DC in the early 60s, was actually founded in the South.

Brimming with illuminating truths, many intentionally hidden or invisible, deceptive, falsified, unknown. Some you may disagree with or want to turn away from but Perry won’t let you. When she speaks of the slaves who were the drivers of America’s economic engine (cotton, steel, coal), her prose is furious but dignified.

The book’s soul overflows with American contradictions and hypocrisies. Virginia is the State with the most Founding Fathers philosophically against slavery, yet even they didn’t practice what they preached as members of the “planter elite.” Here too is the heart of the White Christian evangelical movement that rose up in the sixties with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Perry traces religious right and political extremist movements all the way to the Capitol Insurrection.

Interestingly, West Virginia became a state to succeed from Virginia’s “foundationally anti-slavery.” Harper’s Ferry is where “one of the greatest White allies to the cause of Black freedom” John Brown staged an abolitionist raid. Yet West Virginia is also where Appalachian Black coal miners made corporations rich while they labored in dangerous conditions, dire poverty, and formed unions, and yet they were “neglected by the rest of the nation.” This pattern of the “face-off between the haves and the laboring have nots” is shown repeatedly over and over all around the country. “Trauma repeats.”

Kentucky’s story is similarly contradictory. The Kentucky Derby, a symbol of wealth and privilege versus the murder of endeavoring Breonna Taylor in Louisville. “The crudest enforcement arm of White Supremacy.”

Alabama, the birthplace of Perry’s beloved grandparents, is the home of the Dred Scott Supreme Court case that decided “black people were not and could not become citizens of the United States.” The early 1900s Scottsboro case another “example of the racism of the American justice system and social order.” Perry attributes her multiple autoimmune diseases to coal and steel mining pollution in her native birthplace that has the “highest rates of mental illness and the lowest rates of medical care” in the country. Mobile with all its Gulf Coast mobile homes a place of devastation again and again, contrasted by its magnolias and ancient oaks. “There is no easy resolution between beauty and terror.” 

Mississippi, home to the notorious State prison Parchman Farm, shockingly still enslaves Black men. And yet this is the state with the “most extensive Black political representation in America.” 

Georgia: Atlanta, the “birthplace of a King, the iconic hero of civil rights,” and the “center of Black music production” with more than half of its population Black. Still, the “unbearable Whiteness of its being . . . leaves most Black Atlantans vulnerable.” 

More states, more indignation. Specific yet race is consistently a “top and bottom approach.”

Perry’s literary influences are all over these pages too. Albert Murray’s 1971 Alabaman memoir, South to a Very Old Place, appears to be inspiration for this book. W. E. B. Dubois’ 1900s classic The Souls of Black Folk expresses a sentiment Perry also embraces: it’s not enough to be a Black. You must bear a “double consciousness” of being Black on the inside, American outside, which takes “remarkable grace.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Perry’s graduate school advisor, who elevated “the way Black authors get read and the way history gets told,” another major influence.

“The dance speaks to everyone” is the epigraph quoted from Alvin Ailey. Followed by an Introduction involving a French Louisiana dance, a Quadrille, it sets the all-embracing message that South to America speaks to all of us.

Lorraine

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Breaking free of expectations and limitations (Hollywood, California on one contemporary day): What happens if you can no longer tell a lie? Not even a fib not to offend?

Lucy Green wakes up on her 30th birthday and discovers that even when she tries her tongue, physically, won’t let her say anything but the truth. On the surface, Nothing But the Truth has a light-hearted, straightforward premise – outlandish, witty, romantic – yet that’s not everything going on. How could it be when the author, Holly James, is also a psychologist?

Honesty has psychic consequences. Which explains why James brings more to her debut novel than literary and pop culture smarts. As a psychologist for both academic and corporate worlds, she’s created a protagonist who’s intensely career-focused, showing us she understands how a woman’s mind and heart work in high-powered, cutthroat business environments.

Lucy loves her junior publicity job at a “Hollywood institution” that promotes movie stars and smooths over celebrity scandals, J & J Public. Lucy is really good at her job, so much so that the top two things out of four on the list she’s drafted that will make her milestone day “perfect” are job-related:

  • “Lock down Lily Chou,” the “hottest new scarlet in Hollywood” with the “Oscar buzz,” so she can
  • ”Secure promotion” to senior publicist. A slight problem to foil her plans is her do-anything-to-get-ahead agency competitor, “Supervillain” Chase, is courting an even potentially bigger client, an NBA Laker’s superstar.

How corporate leaders and decision-makers create a culture that can have a major influence on our happiness, comfort, and success on the job is just one of a number of today’s news stories Lucy grapples with when she turns thirty.

An extraordinary day. A day even her immediate boss, Joanna – one of the J’s in the firm’s name – summarizes when she describes the nature of “celebrity publicity” in Tinseltown: “Never a dull day in this town.” As in, never a dull moment in this novel. A day in which so much happens it consumes an entire novel, charming us on one level and resonating on a deeper one.

For Lucy, the litany of out-of-the-ordinary, absurd things that happen to magically transform her into the most honest person you may ever meet feels like a lifetime. Being honest is not just with herself. It’s with everyone she interacts with: her mother; her best girlfriend from college, Nina; her colleagues (though her relationship with her best friend at work Oliver seems delightfully to have already been pull-no-punches, authentic before this day); her mentor/boss, Joanna; and the CEO of the company – the other J in the company name – Jonathan, Joanna’s brother.

Overarching all these relationships is how Lucy in particular, many women in general, go about their daily lives reflecting cultural and gender expectations of what a woman should or should not do. Lucy knows what that means and feels like. Today is the day she revolts.

In doing so, James has written a feminist manifesto disguised as a bewitching novel that’s a self-help roadmap for finding the strength, courage, and conviction to help free women of the stereotypes, unwritten rules, bad and unhappy decisions that seek to limit them in many arenas. Since Lucy’s career means so much to her, dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace is a dark, silenced undercurrent that’s been contained – until this be-honest day.

How a woman’s appearance should look to get ahead, physique and fashions, as if these were the important things that determined a woman’s “value” James makes a point of saying, is part of the story. So is the ticking-time-hormonal-bomb of getting married and when to have children.

Fundamental to all of the above is being honest with yourself as to what you want in life and how you want to be treated in your relationships: parental, collegial, platonic, and romantic.

What Lucy also discovers is that being honest with herself and others has life-altering consequences. Everything isn’t black-or-white when it comes to truth-telling. In theory, abiding to a moral code should always be virtuous. But you need to be prepared for what might come, for instance, when you spout out to your mother when she calls to wish you a happy birthday, adding a recurring comment that strikes at Lucy’s anxieties, that maybe she’ll never be a grandmother. Who said she must have kids? Mothers will likely get over the disappointment of shocking declarations, but rejecting the head of your company’s sexual power plays are likely to result in losing your job, certainly not getting that promotion you’ve worked so hard for and deserve. Telling truths may be the ethical path to follow, but in real life not necessarily in your best interests or others you either care about or need in your corner.

In the face of Lucy putting up with Jonathan’s abusive transgressions that victimize her, she’s become a pro at “chaos management” – damage control, “babysitting,” cleaning up a megastar’s unseemly, scandalous behavior – but on this day she learns of a younger co-worker distraught over being sexually exploited. Combined with truth-telling, today marks the day silence is no longer an option.

Lucy isn’t all black-and-white either. Specifically, #4 on her birthday list, indicates she’s a modern woman who wants to have it all. She’s hoping, hmmm expecting, her boyfriend Caleb will “finally” ask her to marry him. Does she get what she wants? That depends on whether you think having a not very dull day means enchanting or fated. Expect both.

Lucy kicked off celebrating her birthday the night before by stepping into a bar not far from her office, where she’s served a “lavender-colored” cocktail by a handsome bartender with a “killer smile.” Subconsciously she didn’t notice him, occupied by dreamy thoughts of Caleb, but she did take away one thing the bartender said: his concoction would be “life-changing.”

Today is also the day Lucy asks: why torture herself to the physical misery, the intensity of the “Ken Doll” instructor, the too-tight tights, and the starving breakfast when Nina picks her up for their scheduled spinning class? Nina complies since it’s a special day, so they go out for a “bagel gooey with cheese.” Why not indulge? Why a social transgression? This spreads to rebelling against all the fakery of getting ready for work: the uncomfortable “costume,” make-up, hair fussing, Spanx Shapewear. Lucy’s sentiments echo today’s headlines after the comfort of remote work during the pandemic. Why not dress as our “true selves”? James asks.

So this becomes the day Lucy turns heads at work dressed like something’s wrong. Of course, that’s going to be the least of it. At one point, Lucy starts to blame everything on that lavender drink. Was it spiked, “cursed”? When she returns to the same bar and bartender, whose name she learns is Adam, he tells her being honest is a gift.

In her gracious Acknowledgements, James says she hopes her novel “can make anyone relate, laugh, reflect, or find a voice they didn’t know they have.” Looks like her wishes have come true. Will Lucy’s?

Lorraine

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Surrealism and Existentialism in literature and art (fictional coastal Connecticut town, present-day; East Village, Manhattan twenty-years ago): “Contemporary art is a great catalyst for serious conversations,” said the co-founder of Washington, DC’s soon-to-open private museum of modern art, the Rubell Museum.

The obsession to create groundbreaking art underscored in The Hundred Waters does for literature what it does for art: act as a catalyst for opening provocative conversations on contemporary crises of the soul and the planet as we know it. Endangered animals, a feature.

Lauren Acampora’s second novel (her first, The Paper Wasp, also explores art and “twisted ambition”; also authored an award-winning short story collection, The Wonder Garden) seems meant to be read on two levels: as a mesmerizing, eerie story and a symbolic, existential one. Like modern art, open to interpretations.

Some elements are familiar, others weird. “Strange” is an adjective even the publisher uses in its dust jacket description. The prose is exceptionally hypnotic. Words are notably intentional, shaping characters and the plot’s ambivalence, ambiguity, edginess, mystique.

Louisa Rader was and still yearns to be an acclaimed avant-garde photographer. Formerly a fashion model who wanted to be seen as having substance. Superficiality, significance, and originality are themes. Now thirty-nine, she spent twenty-years living in the bohemian enclave of NYC’s East Village. She left before gaining attention in a new wave of Post-Modern photography. Acampora doesn’t tell us what photographic style Louisa has focused on but it’s in the realm of controversial and intimate, dropping clues. For instance, three highly controversial photographers whose work achieved notoriety are named:

We meet Louisa having lived twelve years in a fictional, wealthy suburban town in coastal Connecticut that feels close to Manhattan but removed from an artist who made no effort to keep in touch with the artsy scene she was once part of. Fleeing from there, she married a man twenty-years older than her, Richard, and is the mother of a twelve-year-old girl, Sylvie. Richard is the reason she’s back in CT, where she grew up. He’s a sought-after contemporary architect with a conventional style of parenting. More so in his worrying, rightfully so, about his adolescent daughter who’s like her mother: moody and keeps to herself. It fits Louisa’s personality and artsy perspective that she prefers to give her daughter more freedom. A source of tension in the marriage, but not the only problem.

The family lives in a “glass house” Richard built. The glass, symbolic of cool, detached, is essentially how Richard comes across with Louisa and how she mothers Sylvie. There’s more to Louisa’s aloofness than not wanting to be a helicopter parent. At times, resentful of motherhood, as if parenting held her back all these years from experimenting with her artistic cravings. Richard’s too busy and self-occupied to notice. When “Louisa withdraws to the master bedroom,” the word withdraw is a perfect choice since she’s withdrawn from her family (and community) for a long time. If he’d paid more attention, might the story have a different ending?

A slew of other examples help us interpret a novel that straddles both beauty and darkness in an intentional, masterly way. Starting with the fractured, contemporary art design of the book’s cover. What does the imagery mean? The fragility of beauty? Note the pillowcase. Does it suggest the prose and story are dreamlike, surreal, emblematic?

At 240 pages, it would be a mistake to think this is a breezy read. Abstract, mysterious, shadowing like modern art’s role “as a stimulus that can provoke independent thoughts and even emotions.” With multiple themes on artistic ambition and its price; apocalyptic fears of climate change; and the invisible consequences of a life constrained by suburbia, The Hundred Waters reads as if it were hundreds of pages longer.

Louisa’s life is about to dramatically change as she’s finally been stirred to do something about her ennui, alienation. Taking on the role of director of the local arts center, she envisions increasing its visibility by exhibiting and nurturing bold artists, including transforming an empty barn into an artists’ residency program.

When a young stranger comes to live in the town, Gabriel, he’s the perfect storm for the shocking events that will upturn Louisa and Sylvie’s lives, as well as Richard’s and the community at large.

The intentionality of the prose sets the stage for the entire novel in the first two pages. A foreboding mood created between natural things of beauty compared to artificial, superficiality. The sinister overtones are so finely crafted I re-read them twice. Like an artist Acampora paints words, as though she contemplated the precise shade of color to affect our emotions. Doing so, she casts a spell on the reader, somewhat the way artist and environmental activist Gabriel does on Louisa and Sylvie. But he’s a stalker while the author seeks to grab our attention to take stock of what’s important in life while also considering the consequences.

The opening line introduces “trees in bright leaf, juvenile green.” Followed by a moneyed landscape – “tennis courts, swimming pools, guest houses” – interrupted by “acres of wilderness.” A few lines down, the picture is of “a montage of wrought iron gates, stone walls marbled with lichen, driveways that twist into a dream of trees.” Suddenly, in the same paragraph, we’re jolted outside of this insulated suburban world to: “Beyond is fire and blood.” To make sure we understand the novel has a lot to do with climate change the first paragraph ends with:

“The West has begun its long burn while rains soak the plains. The Mississippi surges. A climate group blocks traffic with a boat, pours blood on the streets of London. In Paris, a great cathedral stands charred.”

At the bottom of page one, another switch. To “a boy.” Page two tells us he’s “a man of eighteen, a free agent.” Meaning what? On this page, the boy (Gabriel) appears as an uncomfortable voyageur of “a girl” (Sylvie) he’s surreptitiously photographing while she’s “lost in a book” at a swimming pool. He feels creepy; she friendless, part of her state of mind.

Like Sylvie, Gabriel is an only child of a newly arrived couple from “Austria, old nobility” for whom Richard has designed a house for. When Louisa, anxious to get out of the house more than anything else, decides to attend their housewarming party her smile is “abstract.” Another great word to describe someone who makes a “snap decision” that the house “lacks charm and character,” barely engages with guests, avoids one family she shouldn’t, yet later tells Richard she had a “satisfying” time. Satisfying in what sense? Art?

The house is “heavily decked” with a range of art spanning the “Renaissance to modern art,” but there’s “nothing transgressive” like Lucien Freud’s nudes; or Neo Rauch’s surrealistic paintings; or Gerard Richter’s abstract visual works. All cited.

The Hundred Waters achieves what it set out to do. We may not like how the characters have set themselves up for what happens, but they do shake us up. Telling us not to lull ourselves into a false sense of security. To reflect on how we live our lives. Pay closer attention to the things that really matter – personally and more worldly.

Lorraine

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A haunting family mystery embedded with the best of nature writing (Washington, DC & North Florida; present-day & twenty-five years ago): Lyrical, poignant, and steeped in atmospheric prose, at its heart The Marsh Queen is a nail-biting whodunit.

Creatively blending genres, creative writing professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC Virginia Hartman has made sure there’s something to allure all of us into a mysterious death that happened over two decades ago. Pulling together art and Nature, grief, familial love and obligations, the importance of female friendships and supportive colleagues, with a budding romance, she’s crafted an engrossing novel.

In imagining her main character – Loni Murrow, thirty-six and single – Hartman has imagined an appealing career for her. Seemingly well-matched, yet it comes with both joyful and painful memories.

Loni is an accomplished “bird artist” for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History on the National Mall, which houses the world’s “third largest” bird collection. We know she’s successful at what she does because she’s earned a window in her office, a perk that took nine years to earn. That little detail shows how well Hartman knows how things work in our nation’s capital where windows are coveted by federal employees. Loni’s window enables her to gaze out onto a two-mile long lawn millions walk across as they tend to the nation’s business and visit our national museums.

Loni’s artistic profession is her “salvation” even if the birds she draws from are “skins,” not like the magnificent alive ones in North Florida where she was raised and ran away from. She’ll be seeing and drawing them again, as her story takes her back home to memories she’ll no longer be able to escape from. Hartman’s descriptions of the birds Loni draws and paints is exacting and vivid, in just a few sentences. They’re an element of the novel that’s quite lovely. For instance, compare her literary depiction of the common loon – “its inky head, white banding at the neck, and an intricacy of pin dots and fractured rectangles cascading across the wings” – to the real bird in the natural world:

Common Loon by NWF, USFWS [CC0] on Pixnio

Loni suffers from anxiety and sorrow. When she speaks about her “life story, with all its rivulets and backwaters,” she’s recalling the best part of her former life when she spent time with her beloved dad Boyd who taught her everything about birds while they canoed in the marshes near her fictional, small, gossipy town of Tenetkee on the Gulf Coast of the Florida panhandle.

“The swamp is the only place I can get any clarity,” she says when she’s urgently called back to a place of happy and horrific memories. Her brother Phil has suddenly interrupted the controlled life she’s carved out for herself because their mother Ruth has fallen and has been exhibiting signs of the early onset of dementia, so she can no longer live alone anymore. Tending to her mother’s needs is vexed by the fact that she could never find a kind word for Loni, who’s been unable to figure out why. (Little by little, we learn the reason.) Hypercritical, Hartman crafts prickly dialogue that shows why it is so difficult for Loni to overlook their estrangement.

The twelve-year difference in age with her younger brother presents a different reason for the lack of closeness in the family. That plays out in a closer relationship with their mother, and his inexperience. For Loni, the hole, the emptiness, is the death of her loving father Boyd with whom she was profoundly attached to. A law enforcement officer for US Fish and Game Wildlife Services, he expertly protected those coastal waterways paddling by canoe. The police report claimed his death was drowning by suicide from his canoe, a conclusion Loni and the reader don’t buy.

As the older child and only daughter, the emotional ordeal of packing up the contents of a life rests on Loni’s weary shoulders, while Phil, the consummate accountant, has already put the house up for sale. Besides not even consulting her before making the onerous decision, Loni perceives his wife pushing him to sell. Primed to think that as their relationship hasn’t been good either. A beautician, Tammy has felt Loni, with her prestigious job and university-educated, treating her condescendingly, stereotyped. There may be a nugget of truth to that, conscious or not, as we see their relationship change.

In short, there’s a lot of tension, resentment, anger, and grief going on with this family. Not helped by small towns that know everyone’s business. 

Upon returning home Loni’s saving grace is her best friendship with Estelle, whose avian interests overlap with hers; she works at the Tallahassee Science Museum. Never wanting Loni to move away, they’ve been childhood friends since first-grade. An irreplaceable friendship for those blessed to know what that means. Hartman does. Cleverly, Estelle comes up with a freelancing gig for Loni: an enticement to remain in Florida she hopes while providing her friend some sanity to deal with her family’s crisis.

Purple Gallinule
By FlevoBirdwatching
via FreeImages.com

Estelle has a list of birds for Loni to paint – from real life. Loni balks at the number of birds on the list, thinking her time will be brief in Florida, agreeing to deliver two painted birds. Events spiral, extending her leave of absence allowing Loni to search for, draw, and paint many more birds on the list. Here’s how Hartman describes the Purple Gallinule: “candy-corn bill – yellow at the tip, orange toward the eye – points at the waterline, and the blue and green of the feathers glint in the sunlight.” Impressive again when you compare her description to the image.

It’s always interesting to see how an author segues between past and present. The key one is set in the teeming marshlands where the birds are best spotted. The same waterways Boyd Murrow drowned in.

Loni’s life is turned upside in this twists-and-turns tale, laced with more than one secret. Early on, we see Boyd’s death as sinister as strange things start happening sending messages to Loni to go home. She makes note of the incident but treats it as a silly/sick prank. As creepier things happen, upping the ante one by one, it’s hard to ignore someone doesn’t want her poking around, building the suspense. When assumptions are made by Loni (and us), she (and we) are pulled off-track. Loni isn’t scared initially, but she (and we for her) will be.

Enter Adlai, a bearded guy around Loni’s age. He rents the canoes she frequently reserves to search the waters and the birds on her list. Like her assumptions about Tammy, she doesn’t give him much thought until it dawns on her he’s a “lodestone of a man.” Among Adlai’s qualities, he’s a stickler for truth telling, complicating their growing romance since she’s kept secrets from him. Their evolving relationship offers some comfort to the terrorizing, and shows us how easy it is to take people for granted. 

At 370 pages, The Marsh Queen never lets up. Does Loni end up appreciating Adlai in time? Does she solve the long-held mystery of her father? Does she come to terms with her mother? Her brother? Tammy? Satisfy Estelle’s bird list? Save her job after extending it well-beyond her approved absence? Or, decide to stay in Florida? Each storyline absorbs us.

Remember what’s at the heart of the novel. So the biggest question is whether Loni can save herself?

Lorraine

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