When we first get settled into our Maine digs, our pattern is to hunker down for the first few days. We go almost nowhere and we spend hours on end just reading! I have time to read at home, but somehow, this is a change of pace without a fixed routine and so it’s vacation. Here are three novels that easily kept me immersed in the world of fiction.
The Mapmaker’s Children by Sarah McCoy
Sarah Brown, John Brown’s daughter, was an accomplished artist, abolitionist, and a very independent woman, particularly for the 19th century. Using her as one focus of this novel, Sarah McCoy recreates the events leading up to John Brown’s raid at Harper Ferry and his ultimate hanging from the perspective of his daughters and wife and his close friends the Hill family. His death is just the beginning as McCoy follows Sarah throughout the next twenty plus years using straightforward narration plus letters and newspaper articles.
Linked to Sarah’s story is that of a contemporary couple Eden and Jack Anderson who have purchased an historic home in New Charlestown, West Virginia, not far from Harpers Ferry. The Anderson marriage is on the skids, Eden is desolate over several failed attempts to have a child, and initially she is bent on selling this house and getting out fast. Without going into elaborate detail, suffice it to say that some strange artifacts turn up in the house that set Eden and 11-year old neighbor Cleo on a quest to document the house’s history.
I found this a totally absorbing novel. The writing is wonderfully picturesque and McCoy skillfully and poignantly involves you into these two women’s lives. Even the secondary characters, Cleo, Freddy Hill, his sister Alice, and Ms. Silverdash, the bookstore owner, come alive on the page. I also gained some new insights into how the Underground Railway operated.
The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson
Charming and heartfelt, this novel about life in a small English town in 1914 made me misty. Going against tradition, Agatha Kent, board member and part of a prominent family, advocates for hiring a woman, Beatrice Nash, to replace the school’s Latin teacher. But she is younger and prettier than everyone expects and her independence and somewhat advanced views are a threat to a society that is content with the status quo.
With Beatrice’s arrival in town, I wondered where this novel was going as there are a lot of characters who initially seem secondary: Agatha and John Kent’s nephews Hugh (studying to be a doctor) and Daniel (a poet); Celeste, one of the Belgian refugees the town takes in after the Germans invade their country; Snout (Dickie) Sidley, one of Beatrice’s students; and Mayor Fothergill and his busybody, self-important wife. But Simonson captures the ordinariness of daily life which ceases to be so once young men enlist and go off to fight in France and weaves together the fabric of the town’s divided social classes in a time of changing roles and more relaxed mores. Recommended!
Blueprints by Barbara Delinsky
Delinsky is a bestselling novelist of women’s fiction, stories of romance and family relationships. This, her latest, is a hefty tome that I devoured in a matter of hours. It’s a great beach read, a treat that requires little effort, and yet is very satisfying. You know from the get-go that everything will come right in the end, and the fun is in the getting there. It’s fiction after all and, in this kind of fiction, life gets smoothed out more readily than in real life with no rough edges remaining.
The focus here is on a mother-daughter team who are the leads on a TV show called Gut It! that features homes their family company has rehabbed. When the producers want to replace host Caroline (Mom) with daughter Jamie, hurt feelings and anger ensue and each must reflect on and assess her role and decide who she wants to be. Add in some other complications and two attractive men and life gets mixed up and spiced up!
