Here is a list of the titles I read this summer. Of these twenty-two titles, seven were on my intended summer reading list. I started and abandoned American Spy and The Power of the Dog, read one story in Lauren Groff’s Florida, and am more than a quarter of the way into Middlemarch. It’s a long book and I’m taking it slowly.
My favorite books were The Guest Book, Exposure, and The Lost Man of the novels and Salt Path and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone in nonfiction. But, I have to say, Into the Raging Sea is an amazing piece of reporting.
FICTION
Carnegie’s Maid by Marie Benedict
Clock Dance by Anne Tyler
Evie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
Force of Nature by Jane Harper (mystery)
The Guest Book by Sarah Blake
How to Find Love in a Bookshop by Veronica Henry
The Huntress by Kate Quinn
Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter by Hazel Gaynor
Lost Man by Jane Harper (mystery)
Mapping Murder by William D. Andrews (mystery)
The Oysterville Sewing Circle by Susan Wiggs
A Question of Trust by Penny Vincenzi
Shadows on the Lake by Giovanni Cocco & Anneris Magella (mystery)
When We Left Cuba by Chantal Cleeton
Winter Cottage by Mary Ellen Taylor
NONFICTION
America’s Reluctant Prince: Life of JFK Jr. by Steven Gillon
Into the Raging Sea by Rachel Slade
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb (memoir)
No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder
Salt Path by Raynor Winn (memoir)
Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl (memoir)
I also skimmed portions of Adventures in Nanaville by Anna Quindlen and The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates.
It’s hard to accept how sexist the sailing world was in 1990. The Maiden, a new documentary, is a graphic account of skipper Tracy Edwards and her all female crew’s performance in the Whitbread Round the World Race. In the past women just didn’t compete there or at that level; or, if they were on one of the race boats it was to be the cook, how Tracy spent her first race. Tracy is one determined individual, and she was determined to obtain a boat, hire a crew and strive to win the race.
All twelve crewmembers were women and, despite the fact that all the male journalists (and probably the other skippers) expected that the Maiden crew wouldn’t complete that first leg, they did in first place! And then they did it again in the second leg. Although the film starts out slowly, it’s gripping with harrowing scenes of high seas and high winds. What makes it even more enjoyable is that the crewmembers were interviewed in the making of the film so you see them on board and you get to see and hear their reflections today about their feelings at the time and the whole experience.
Kudos to our local non-profit Harbor Theater for screening this! They have done an admirable job bringing first run films and classics to the Boothbay Harbor community.
ENJOYABLE NOVELS
The Oysterville Sewing Circle by Susan Wiggs
Susan Wiggs (ala.org)
It was just happenstance that the novel I picked up after reading No Visible Bruises about domestic violence was also about battered women. Susan Wiggs writes very good popular fiction. Her characters are believable and sympathetic and she treats their issues with warmth and understanding. In this case, fashion designer Caroline both loses her job in New York and simultaneously finds herself in charge of two small children. She has a rude awakening about the domestic abuse suffered by her friend Angelique. Returning home to Washington State, Caroline must find a new career and deal with the children while she seeks to learn more about domestic violence. This is a novel that educates the reader without ever being preachy. (~JWFarrington)
Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
Linda Holmes (www.npr.org)
Holmes is a pop culture critic for NPR and this is her first novel. It’s sweet with a happy ending. But then, like most romances, you know that everything will work out eventually. Evvie Drake is a young widow who didn’t much like her husband before he died unexpectedly, but no one knows that, and she feels guilty about it. Dean is a major league baseball player, a pitcher who’s got a case of the yips and is unable to pitch. Evvie agrees to rent him the apartment in her house and thus begins an unusual friendship.
Holmes creates two likable characters, each with plenty of mental baggage, and also pulls off a wonderfully enriching friendship between Evvie and her divorced friend and weekly breakfast mate, Andy. If you like baseball and are intrigued by offbeat individuals, this is a good end-of-summer read. (~JWFarrington)
ON THE SMALL SCREEN—Footnote on Borgen
Cast of Borgen (oldaintdead.com)
The Chief Penguin and I just finished binge watching the last episode of Season 3, the final Borgen. And I’m in serious withdrawal. This Danish political series about a female prime minister is topnotch drama, some of the best television I’ve seen in recent years! The third season flags a bit in the beginning, but then re-gains its focus. And the last episode brings everything to closure, possibly too neatly, but with a twist.
The acting is superb, the story is meaty, and the main characters have messy and fascinating personal lives. It’s as much about the people as the politics. There are politicians and their spin-doctors (Denmark has eight parties vying for power) and TV reporters scrounging for stories and better ratings than their competition. Intense and gripping. I lived with these folks!
As critic Andrew Romano points out, “every public decision on Borgen has private consequences, and vice versa, which is something Hollywood usually ignores and real politicians, operatives, and journalists have to hide. Finally getting to see these secret repercussions spool out and spill over isn’t just spellbinding. It’s comforting, too.” (dailybeast.com)
Watching, I also felt as if I acquired a bit of Danish. Borgen is available on Apple TV. The first episode is free and then, if you’re hooked, it’s $24.99 for a season. Highly recommended!
Earlier this week, we headed south of Portland to visit friends on the outskirts of Biddeford. This is a part of Maine we had not seen before, and we were struck by its quiet beauty. Their house sits above Hills Beach bordered by rock with a view toward Basket Island. There are homes there and the owners can drive their cars over the sand at low tide—quite amazing. It being low tide we walked along the sand to the edge of the island.
Lunch was at a general store cum deli counter near Biddeford Pool where we ordered salmon salad, pokes, and fish tacos. Opting for a picnic table on the grass, we had a view of the placid water on this gloriously warm blue-sky day.
Later, Jill gave us a personal tour of downtown Biddeford. An historic textile town (former home of Pepperell), Biddeford is having a bit of a renaissance with a weekly farmers’ market, a cozy café/used bookstore, live music on the street, weekday tours of the mill, and a selection of appealing restaurants and shops. Definitely worth a return visit!
Mural in downtown Biddeford
SUMMER READING
The Guest Book by Sarah Blake
This is one of the best books I’ve read this summer. Set mostly in Maine, it is not a simple read, and I puzzled over some of the family relationships (there are Evelyns in two generations, e.g.). Initially, I found Blake’s prose choppy, with no smooth rhythm, but then I got into her groove. She excels at creating the atmosphere around Crockett’s Island and the hold the island with its big frame house, white, faded and worn, has on this, the third generation of upper crust cousins. Especially Evie. She is the principal character in the present day, a middle-aged academic, married to Paul, a Jew, and mother to teenager Seth.
Evie and her cousins need to make a decision whether to sell or keep the island and house since the trust money for its upkeep is close to running out. Grandfather Owen Milton and his wife Kitty bought the island decades ago. The Miltons took great pride in being Miltons, being successful in business, and living life according to a certain set of mostly unwritten rules. They were at the top of the societal heap and both proud of it and complacent. In their world, one associated with members of one’s own class, one’s children attended only the best schools, and, of course, they married the right people.
Joan, Evie’s recently deceased mother, had one dying wish— to be buried at the island, but not in the graveyard, instead by the picnic area. Evie is unsettled since she doesn’t know why there, and she encounters objections from her cousins. She is an historian whose life work has been uncovering the truths in letters, diaries and archives. But, she feels she knows little about her mother who lived life in the shadows, not fully present to her.
Author Sarah Blake (bookbub.com)
The novel is layered, replete with family secrets, and moves back and forth in time, mainly between the 1930’s, 1959, and the present day. In the 30’s, Grandfather Owen has business dealings in Germany; in 1959, a pre-wedding gathering on the island ominously brings together family members with two outsiders; and in the present, Evie wrestles with a recurring dream about her mother, and with why she herself feels so tied to keeping the island and having nothing change.
Issues of race, religion, and class surface in the characters of Len Levy, who works for Owen Milton, and Reg Pauling, a black man who is Len’s friend and former Harvard classmate. How these two men intersect with the Miltons and how, together and separately, Len and Reg challenge various family members to examine their beliefs and actions make for a novel that I will ponder for some time to come. Highly recommended! For more about what shaped the work, check out this interview with Sarah Blake. (~JWFarrington)
No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder
This is a heavy book about an issue, really a crime, which is often misunderstood and occasionally overlooked. Known familiarly as domestic violence, this author believes it should more appropriately be called something like “intimate-partner violence” or “intimate-partner terrorism.” The statistics on the number of incidents worldwide are staggering, and Snyder presents several case histories that ended in a woman’s death. Death despite restraining orders, time in a shelter, interactions with the police, and the like. For beat cops, domestic disputes have too frequently been viewed as nuisance calls rather than criminal behavior. Added to that, women victims too often recant their testimony due to fear of greater consequences.
Snyder discusses a new tool called the Dangerousness Scale which, if used and heeded, can predict which women are likely to be killed by their partners. One of the strongest predictors of death is if a woman has been strangled by her partner. Violence against a woman escalates in a repeating pattern as her partner works to isolate her from family and friends and to strictly control both her behavior and her movements. When there are children involved, the woman’s incentive to return to an unsafe home environment is largely because of fear of what the man might do to the children.
Author Snyder (amazon.com)
Fortunately, there is room for hope with new research and with the creation of programs for violent men that educate them about the toxic aspects of their masculinity and prompt them to change their actions. Snyder’s book has added depth thanks to the innumerable hours of interviews she conducted with battered women and their families and with abusers; these interviews form the basis for the case histories.
Recommended reading, but not for the beach. For a short piece about the crux of the issue, see this Atlantic article by Snyder. (~JWFarrington)
This is the kind of historical novel that sweeps you up immediately and keeps you absorbed all the way through. Set in 1838 on the Irish coast and in1938 off Newport, Rhode Island, two young women become attached to, devoted, some might say, to their respective lighthouses. Grace Darling, a real individual, lived in the lighthouse on Longstone Island, Ireland, and rescued survivors of a shipwreck in 1838. She became a national hero touted in the papers and painted and drawn by many artists. In 1938, the fictional Matilda, nineteen, unmarried and pregnant, is sent from her home in Ireland to a relative in Rhode Island, who is one of a handful of female lighthouse keepers.
How the parallel stories of these two women, Grace and Matilda, are linked through storms and destruction is the stuff of the novel. In the process, you learn a lot about what was involved in keeping a lighthouse functioning pre-automation. (~JWFarrington)
Force of Nature by Jane Harper
I liked Harper’s latest mystery, The Lost Man, so much that I’ve gone back and gotten her two earlier works. One still resides unread on my Kindle; this one I read in paperback. Five women trek into the Australian bush on a corporate team building exercise, but only four return to the appointed site. A wide-ranging search is undertaken to try and locate the missing Alice Russell.
Although I did not find this novel as compelling as the other one, it is well plotted and creatively organized with two timelines running simultaneously. In present time, federal agents Aaron Falk and his partner, Carmen Cooper, are asked to become involved since they are investigating the company’s CEO in a separate matter. Interwoven with the ongoing search effort are day-by-day accounts of the hike told from the perspective of the individual women. Disagreements, underlying jealousies and office competitiveness combine for a less than harmonious experience that leads to tragedy. (~JWFarrington)
KEEPING BUSY
While I can spend many enjoyable hours just reading, Maine at this time of year offers a varied selection of diversions. And when we have house guests, there is even more reason to take advantage of this region’s cultural and dining opportunities.
Home and Garden Tour
Each year the Boothbay Region Garden Club showcases six area homes and their gardens. This year three of the houses were on Southport Island, including the former Lawnmere Inn, and the others in Boothbay Harbor. It was a lovely blue sky day and just warm enough to be pleasant. To deal with narrow streets and difficult parking, school buses were used to shuttle us around, and the whole affair was very well organized. As is our tradition, eight of us rounded out the tour with lunch on the deck at Linekin Bay.
Organ Concert
All Saints-by-the-Sea is a summer chapel on Southport that not only offers weekly worship services, but also the occasional organ recital or evensong service. This small wooden chapel is more than a hundred years old and sits in the woods, hidden down a side road and overlooking the water. You can park on the main road and walk down the hill or arrive by boat at their dock. All Saints is Episcopal in its affiliation, but welcomes visitors from all denominations and faiths.
We’ve attended several recitals here in the past. One recent Sunday afternoon, despite the heat, we were pleased to hear renowned organist, Henry Lowe. Organist and music director emeritus, Church of the Redeemer in Baltimore, Lowe played pieces by several French composers (Faure and others) as well as a prelude and fugue by Bach. His short comments about each work were enlightening and added to this listener’s appreciation. These recitals always end with a lovely reception (with wine) on the deck looking out at the rocks, dock, and water.
Yacht Club
View of Boothbay Harbor
Florida friends visited us this week and thanks to B and A’s reciprocal privileges, combined with B’s charm offensive, we were able to have lunch at the Boothbay Harbor Yacht Club. In their attractive dining room with windows on three sides overlooking the harbor, we enjoyed some tasty sandwiches and salads. We hope to return!
