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:

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.

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

The Dinosaur Race – casting a wide net on what the discovery of dinosaurs meant and means for the planet (1830s to 2010): Dinosaurs are having a heyday!

What’s the connection between the eye-popping 2022 dinosaur discoveries – “ginormous” dinosaur bones in Portugal; new species in Canada, Argentina, Zimbabwe; 100 million-year-old footprints in China – and the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago?

What’s the chance these unearthings happened around the same time The Monster Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World was released?

Climate change has led to a “new golden age of paleontology,” says Reuter’s reporter Daniel K. Randall in his new nonfiction book. If “climate change always wins,” then the book is a monster of a warning on life as we know it.

Unfolding like a novel, The Monster’s Bones is engrossing as reality can sometimes outdo imaginations. Randall’s prose reads like an Indiana Jones swashbuckling cinematic adventure, but the expeditions he traces were funded by fledgling natural history museums and university departments racing to be the first to discover the fossilized bones of dinosaurs – with a fixation on the “iconic” T. Rex, Tyrannosaurus Rex – essentially founding a new field of paleontology as opposed to ancient archaeology.

You won’t even realize its science you’re reading until you reach the extensive biographical and source notes. You will, though, be hit by so much history you weren’t aware of despite reading/being read to/reading to your children any of the countless children’s dinosaur books on the market. One to highlight is Mister Bones since the man it’s about is also the star of Randall’s dinosaur show, Barnum Brown.

If his first name rings a bell that’s because this boy born on a Kansas farm was named for P. T. Barnum of Ringling Bros. fame, traveling around the country with his circus around the time he was born. Prophetically, Barnum Brown’s spirit and legacy well-exceeds circus magic, having devoted a long lifetime in pursuit of giant monsters. Making him a giant in his own right and the force behind Randall’s fascinating saga.

Barnum Brown was responsible for discovering “more than half of the dinosaur specimens” on display at the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His discovery of the first skeleton of “one of the largest known predators” that roamed the Earth over 200 million eons ago, T. rex, brought world-class fame to the Museum and the paleontologist.

There’s about 200 natural history museums in America. The American Museum’s chief rival is the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Both museums have curated major new dinosaur exhibitions. In NYC: https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/t-rex-the-ultimate-predator; in DC: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/exhibits/david-h-koch-hall-fossils-deep-time. Evidence enough dinosaurs will forever captivate.

Barnum Brown is depicted as larger than life. Always in “search of something new” combined with a nearly innate ability “to read rock formations” and a giant well of energy even late in life, he built reputations and greatness. Others fill these pages too – names you know and are unfamiliar with – but its Barnum, along with the most powerful creatures in the history of our planet, winning our hearts and awe. He couldn’t have done what he accomplished without the financial backing of many, but they couldn’t have achieved the heights that they did without him.

Randall has done a marvelous job of chronicling the early fossil hunters in Europe followed by those in America who funded their digs from the 19^th to 21^st centuries. We don’t think of the pioneering Westward Movement in terms of dinosaur bone hunting but America in 1890s and early 1900s Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana provided an abundant concentration of ancient bones buried beneath layers of geological rocks. Other Western states were also excavated: New Mexico, South Dakota, Colorado, Arizona, Texas.

Similarly, you wouldn’t think dinosaurs had anything to do with the Gilded Age, ushered in when industrialization concentrated enormous wealth in the hands of the very few, but men like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and George Peabody sought to implant their legacies by funding expeditions by Brown and others for their respective museums: Morgan for the American Museum, Carnegie for his Pittsburgh museum, and Peabody at Yale’s. The roles Morgan entrusted to his nephew Henry Osborn and Peabody to his nephew Othneil Marsh formed a formidable triumvirate with Brown.

To his credit, Randall makes sure we considerably tamp down our praise for Osborn as he later became a leader in the appalling Eugenics movement. We don’t expect, shock more like it, that the most famous dinosaur in the world is linked in any way to racism and Darwin’s theory of evolution, but it inspired the theory that dinosaurs went extinct due to their small brains, so they weren’t intelligent. As if this could even remotely justify the debasing notion that one race (or person with a disability) could be more intelligent and valued than another, but apparently it did:

“The twin fields of natural history and conservation were filled with men who saw no separation between their beliefs in science and in racial hierarchy. The endpoint of this line was the eugenics movement, which held that applying the principles of genetic selection to the human population would cure the Earth of “undesirables,” ranging from the physically infirm to darker-skinned peoples.”

Reading certainly opens our eyes! But who would ever envision T. rex and racism paired together? Randall, the journalist, has connected more dots than we could have ever imagined. 

The book’s multi-pronged, multi-layered approach thankfully doesn’t fit neatly into one characterization. History, the birth of a young science, obsession, and culture are wrapped up in an entertainment phenomenon. Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie Jurassic Park, Disney’s Fantasia, and the Dinoland exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair are examples cited.

Another dimension of Barnum Brown’s life is featured: fossil-hunting outside of America. He hunted for dinosaur bones in Mexico, Cuba, India, Burma, and Patagonia, which stands out for its vast “underdeveloped” lands in Argentina and Chile and death-defying obstacles he conquered to bring home a “haul of fossils.”

A more intimate side happens when Barnum meets, falls in love, and marries Marion Raymond, a teacher; both graduate students at Columbia University. A womanizer by various accounts, but in Marion he found a “distinctive mix of purpose and fun.” She became his soulmate, accompanying him on digs, while also understanding his need for freedom to travel alone at a moment’s notice. She a stable force for the first and only time in his life, they lived in Brooklyn and had a daughter, Frances. The poignancy of their marriage and impact on Barnum’s life cannot be understated, nor is it.

While others discovered fantastical dinosaur skeletons like an 84-foot-long Diplodocus (!) and the skull of a Triceratops that weighed three tons (!), no one outdid Barnum Brown, the greatest showman in the world of prehistoric life.

The Monster’s Bones leaves us better informed, questioning the future of “humankind.” The biggest takeaway is the urgency of treating climate change as earth shattering. Which is why this absorbing book is also an important read.

Lorraine

Finding love when you need it most (Australia, Scotland, Ireland, England; present-day): Once named Australia’s reading ambassador, today Australian-born Monica McInerney has been called “Queen of feel-good novels.” The Godmothers, her 13^th novel, shows why those literary attributions.

On a Zoom book event, the novel’s charming cover drew my attention. The three women with matching red dresses are Eliza Maxine Olivia Miller and the two godmothers she’s named for. Maxine is a popular, openly gay actress in a TV soap drama filmed in Sydney, Australia. Olivia manages a family-owned luxury hotel, the Montgomery, in Edinburgh, Scotland, adorned with art on the walls from Scottish, Italian, French, and Australian artists. For the past nine years, detail-oriented Eliza devoted herself to conference planning in Melbourne, Australia, spending over fifty hours a week on the job, leaving little time for a personal life and friendships, though she made room for her true passion: art. Eliza knows she’s blessed to have both Maxie and Olivia in her corner. One of them always there for her “just when she needed them.”

McInerney, who splits her time between Australia and Ireland and has also lived in London, believes, “A change of scene fills your soul.” She’s delightfully filled our armchair wanderlust by creating a contemporary plot with multiple storylines that takes Eliza to different parts of the world. 

Eliza has needed all the comfort in the world that her two godmothers gave her and persist on giving her, having been all too glad to sweep her away from her troubled mother to many far-flung places by the time she was seventeen. Eliza’s mother Jeannie was wise to choose her two boarding school friends to watch over and indulge her only child. They suspected their unreliable friend wasn’t telling the truth about her escapades, disappearances. That her stories of wild adventures were figments of her imagination, but they didn’t press her because they loved her. Back then, a free-spirit. As a single mother, Jeannie continued to tell fantastical stories to Eliza, painting happy images to mask how unsettled their lives were, moving to eight towns in the first eleven years of her Eliza’s childhood.

But the one thing they can’t give her that she desperately wants is to know who her father is? Her mother never told her. She promised she would when she reached eighteen, but she died before then. Fast forward more than twenty years later when Eliza is thirty and has not stepped foot into a plane since then. You’ll see why her phobia, triggered by trauma, is rational. Eliza sensed her mother was unlike other mothers; her godmothers knew more yet chose to keep potentially devastating secrets from her to protect her. Those secrets are revealed over 450 engaging pages that flow with ease.

You can’t help but root for Eliza, handling the hard-knocks of her life with such grace and diligence. Most of her story is told when the rug has been pulled out from under her carefully controlled life, when her company was bought out and she was let go.

Eliza’s story resonates from an employment perspective, her lonely path, and her and her godmothers’ complicated contemporary families. Olivia is a reluctant manager of her husband Edgar’s intended legacy hotel he’s no longer able to run, and Maxine is at a crossroads in her career having found the love of her life, Hazel, soon bound for New York City’s world of theatre.

One of the endearing qualities of Eliza’s character is how she gravitates to staying out of the limelight as a highly reliable and effective “backroom person,” while others crave the center of attention.

Another character with “something old-fashioned about him,” enters Eliza’s topsy-turvy world when she visits Olivia’s elegant hotel in Scotland. He, like Eliza, proves to be invaluably helpful and prefers to remain in the background: Lawrence, the hotel manager. With so much on her mind and used to being alone, it takes her a while to notice that he’s “a gentleman” who looks like “he’d stepped out of a black-and-white film.” One of the feel-good aspects of the novel is the way she awakens to their romantic chemistry and he courts her like a gentleman.

A third character will also win your heart: an erudite, eleven-year-old boy, Sullivan. Eliza meets him on her nervous flight from Melbourne to Edinburgh. Acutely aware he’s “more cerebral than physical,” which makes him an oddball with his peers, he too is lonely. Achingly so. Seated on one side of Eliza on the plane, an older anxious woman on the other, his emotional intelligence and formal, adult-like way of speaking is precious, like him. Assuming the role of calmer-in-chief, he counsels both women: “Sometimes it feels better to feel human touch when you’re scared.”

Sullivan is the latch-key kid we used to hear all about. His parents are divorced; he lives with his rich, physician dad who has no time or patience for him. Neither does his stepmother, busy with their newborn and worn out by his constant questions and chatter. Eliza, though, treats him with respect and sensitivity. He helps her make it through to Edinburgh where he also lives, and is rewarded when he keeps reaching out to her and she sweetly, sibling-like, empathetically lets him into her life. Their developing relationship also makes you feel good, as opposed to the author labeling or stereotyping him. He’s different. Marvelously so. 

By creating characters who deserve so much more in life than they’ve been getting, McInerney enchants. The two godmothers are certainly integral to this – the best friends anyone could have. Although, keeping BIG secrets has consequences.

Much revolves around the comings-and-goings at the Montgomery, which includes Olivia’s two stepsons. One who thinks and acts like he’s God’s gift to women and doesn’t have any problems; the other the good, gentle one. Another family member, Celine, the boys’ grandmother, is a loud, insulting trouble-maker staying at the hotel who won’t leave. Rude, crude, and cruel, Lawrence has put up with her demands and shenanigans for a long while. Eliza new to the ornery woman’s lashing-out game, behaves like the pro she is wielding her magic. Beneath Celine’s armor, Eliza and the reader sense she too suffers from terrible loneliness. Eliza is the one willing to step in.

Maxine is dealing with a lot too. Again, Eliza offers to help her, this time having to fly to London, where she discovers something at the heart of her story: a way to perhaps find her father, her identity – this time taking her to Ireland where her backstory comes together. When it does, it’s sorrowful and joyful.

Art is a common, elevating thread. Eliza loves painting, finds art a “great solace.” John Singer Sargent’s painting, “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” holds special meaning for her. Olivia’s passion is art history, funneled into all those magnificent paintings lining the hotel walls. Easygoing stepson Rory’s interests lie outside of the hotel to a different art form: painting wooden puzzles. Maxine and Hazel are drawn to acting viewed on the TV screen and live on stage.

When Eliza realizes “how soothing it was to be in his [Lawrence] presence,” the same can be said of the novel. Soothing in spite of all the “messes” Eliza sorts out. 

The ending will make you feel so good. Like Sargent’s glowing lanterns.

Lorraine

Transported to 19^th century Eastern Ukraine where an extraordinary friendship blossomed between one of the greatest short story writers and a blind doctor who saw him like no one else did (Luka, Ukraine 1888-1891; London, a French village, Geneva 2014): Alison Anderson’s The Summer Guest is an elegant stunner of historical fiction. Prose as enchanted as can be. Inspired by a little-known, enchanted friendship.

Released in 2016, set mostly over two summers from 1888 to ‘89, the novel couldn’t be more poignant in the summer of 2022 when Russia’s war against Ukraine has devastated a long ago bucolic countryside in the village of Luka, south of Kyiv. It’s here that Anderson recreates and fictionalizes Anton Chekhov’s unique relationship with a Ukrainian doctor who’d lost her eyesight to a terminal illness (also causing terrible seizures and headaches, the diagnosis revealed at the end). Chekhov was at the cusp of enormous fame. How ironic and chilling that he was born in Taganrog, Russia near the Sea of Azov bordering Ukraine’s Donbas region, an area fiercely bombarded today. Two other connected storylines set in 2014 reverberate Ukraine’s protesting of Russia’s soon-to-be takeover of Crimea.

August is Women in Translation Month, which the author co-founded. Anderson, who now devotes all her time to translating French novels (over 100), translated “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbery, a “phenomenal” success. Who better to imagine an 1800s novel – mostly written as a diary discovered in 2014 – requiring translation from the “difficult, its beauty idiosyncratic and complex” Russian language into English? A novel in which the translator character struggles with the invisibility of her profession, hoping translating the secret diary will take her out of the shadows.

Zina Lintvaryov is the blind diary writer. Her gentle, younger piano-playing brother Georges concocts a solution to enable her to write legibly enough to record the intimate conversations she exchanged with twenty-eight-year-old Anton Chekov, also a doctor, when he and his family rented a modest guesthouse on her family’s East Ukraine country estate. The richness of their private thoughts is far-ranging: literary, philosophical, passion/love/marriage, family, and the meaning of life. Made even more special by Anderson’s glowing prose.

The writing so lifelike that one of the conversational threads – Zina’s encouraging Anton to write a long novel in the Russian tradition like Tolstoy while sheltering in this peaceful place away from all his commitments – will have you guessing whether the short story writer and playwright ever wrote a novel hiding someplace. Making their tender friendship an intriguing literary mystery as well.

The two forge the emotional essence of the novel, but there’s also a large Cast of Characters, historical and fictional. The introductory list might look intimidating, so you may want to bookmark the handy cheat sheet for quick reference until you get the hang of all the names. Presented in three lists: one for each family and a third for Their Guests. The novel shows how both Zina and Anton care deeply about family, and value their friends, literature, music, and servants.

The Lintvaryovs include Zina’s mother who owns the estate, where her five children and the wife of the older son, with a baby on the way, live. The Chekhovs include the father and one more child – five sons and a daughter. Occupations are listed alongside their names. Elena, also a doctor, is the sister Zina is closest to (both serious-minded), while younger Natasha, a schoolteacher, the playful and flirty one. Anton is closest to his brother Nikolay, an artist whose health is compromised. In addition to their given names and surnames, two more names are listed and used, reflecting the Slavic tradition of naming. For instance, Anton’s full name is Anton Pavlovich (Antosha) Chekhov: given name, then father’s first name called patronymnic (as in Anton, son of Pavel, a grocer), followed by his nickname (in parenthesis), the diminutive, catchier name.

The 2014 storylines present two other female characters that matter. Both wrestling with their own issues related to the primary story, crafted so cleverly you don’t appreciate the extent of their significance until much later. The novel approaches 400 pages; nothing is fluff. Ana, the translator, is an American living in a small village in France near the Swiss border, spending much-needed time with a supportive friend in Geneva. She’s drawn from American Constance Garnett who translated Chekhov into English. Divorced, living alone for three years, the diary promises to bring her the recognition and identity she yearns for. Katya, the publisher who contacted her, emigrated from the former Soviet Union to London. The fictionalized Polyana Press realistically portrays the struggles to stay afloat triggered by the 2008 recession, causing much tension with her husband Peter. Is that all that’s going on?

Zina, Ana, and Katya all share admiration for Russian literature.

What moves us is most is Anton’s sensitivity towards Zina, and her keen perception of the elusive Chekhov. When he speaks of her “sensitivity,” he tells her: “You go beyond the surface straight to the person, to the soul, the spirit. There is something in you – a sixth sense – that removes the barriers that sight imposes in others.” She, in turn, achingly touches us believing that extra sense, blindness, is an asset in allowing her to “see” Anton’s “true self.” This happens almost immediately. “We have just met,” he says, “but people are rarely as honest with me as you have just been.” Followed by: “You don’t know me, but you know me well.” Zina accepts her fate but dreams of some “unexpected happiness of a rare, special kind” that will befall her before it’s too late. The diary is proof of that: “He restores a fractured loveliness to my blind world,” she writes. Later he shares a similar joy: “Sitting here on the veranda, talking, we are living deeply, with our awareness of each other, our questioning of life.”

The novel also provides an unusual window into how an adult who loses their eyesight moves through the world. Likewise, we get glimpses into the hidden side of this almost mythical literary giant. The prose captures the beauty and melancholy of their ephemeral friendship, and how the peaceful landscape gave them both strength.

Zina and Anton didn’t run towards love. She recalls a young man she turned away; Chekhov believes, “Love makes a muddle of creativity.” (He didn’t marry until 1901, when he was forty-one.) Gentlemanly and respectful, he often touches and kisses Zina’s fingers.

Katya isn’t responsive to Ana’s emails, such as the one asking what to do about the absence of quotes? So you’ll read the diary as penned, which lets Zina and Anton’s voices flow as if one.

The irresistible mystery is whether Chekov, who says he didn’t have “time for novels,” actually wrote one? Another provocative question is how Katya came into possession of the diary more than a century later?

The guesthouse where the Chekhovs stayed was turned into the Chekhov House Museum. Will it survive the war? Anderson has memorialized what’s in jeopardy of being lost.

Lorraine

Pioneering feminist’s pilgrimage offers a birds-eye-view of the first-half of 20^th 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