Author Archives

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The Violin Conspiracy, by Brendan Slocumb

The Violin Conspiracy

I stumbled on this 2022 novel by chance. What a treat it turned out to be!

Playing one of his high school’s loaner violins, Ray McMillan finds his life’s passion. He loves music, especially classical music. However, his mother wants him to drop out of school as soon as the law allows and get a job at Popeye’s so he can help support the family.

No one in his family understands or supports his love of music except his grandmother Nora who gives him the fiddle owned by her own grandfather, a slave, given to him by his enslaver. Dirty and in need of repair, the fiddle is Ray’s most precious possession.

As a Black teenager, Ray finds his path barred in many ways. As my own son’s first grade teacher said, “No one expects to find a genius in a neighborhood like this.” Luckily he encounters teachers who help him get a scholarship to study music and advise him during his adjustment to college.

When he finishes school and begins auditioning, he discovers that PopPop’s fiddle is actually a Stradivarius, worth $10 million. He becomes a sensation, due to his remarkable talent and amazing story, but he still encounters racism at every turn.

And he’s got other headaches: His family orders him to sell the violin and share the money with them. Not to be left out, the Marks family, descendants of PopPop’s enslaver, claim the violin is theirs.

Then, just as he’s preparing to compete in the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition, he opens his violin case to find it empty except for a white Chuck Taylor sneaker and a ransom note.

The author ratchets the suspense up even more, as the clock is ticking down to the start of the competition and to the deadline to raise the ransom money or find the thieves. Could his family have taken it? Or the Marks family? Or professional robbers?

This is simply a great read. The characters are well-drawn; many of them seemed like people I know. It’s a wonderful story with much to say about our culture here in the U.S. and in the international music world.

The author’s descriptions of performances make the music itself come alive. But you don’t have to love classical music to enjoy this story of a young man with a remarkable gift and the tenacity to make the most of it. Plot, character, theme, settings: this novel has it all.

Is there a debut novel that you enjoyed and would recommend?

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If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

If I Survive You

In this remarkable debut, the author gives us eight interconnected stories about a Jamaican-American family. Most of them center on Trelawny, the younger child, born after Topper and Sarah emigrated to Florida in the 1970s with Delano, their beloved first-born. Not only is Trelawny American in a way that the rest of his family is not, but he is also sensitive and bookish, earning scorn from his father and brother.

“In Flux” explores the complexity of race as Trelawny tries to find out what he is. His light-skinned parents were not considered Black in Jamaica, but he certainly is when he goes to college in the Midwest. That’s just the first layer, as he keeps peeling them back, showing both the obvious and the subtle workings of racism in the U.S.

In this, as in several other stories, the author makes extensive use of second-person point-of-view: addressing the reader directly as “you.” It’s an interesting choice. A fad for second person swept the literary world after the success of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and then quickly became tiresome.

Here it works by engaging the reader and creating a buzzing immediacy. The author avoids the doldrums with the vibrant energy of his prose, the precision of his depictions of the culture, and his irrepressible—if often dark—humor. It is also a good choice for someone who hasn’t yet figured out who he is or if he as a person actually exists.

The other characters are unforgettable: Cukie, whom Trelawny envies because he gets to spend a summer with his father learning lobstering; Jelly, whose racist family baits Trelawny in the strangest Thanksgiving dinner ever; Delano, who totally buys into his privilege as the preferred son and assumes the world will likewise deliver for him. One story, in Jamaican dialect, presents Topper as a young man deciding to emigrate to Florida.

Having just been reading the essay “Dysfunctional Narratives” by Charles Baxter, I couldn’t resist applying his thesis that too many books are about a young person identifying the trauma that damaged them when young—usually from their family—and has continued to ruin their lives. Writers sometimes refer to this as the protagonist’s wound.

But if that is all there is to the story, then readers lose interest. Most readers want to see characters who grow and “start to act like adults, with complex and worldly motivations.” I agree with Baxter that we want to see characters admit their mistakes, take responsibility for them, perhaps even justify them.

Trelawny, at least, does acknowledge his mistakes. And certainly he is a victim of so many circumstances: racial discrimination, poverty, his father’s oft-stated preference for Delano, even a hurricane that destroys their home. However, even with the humor and brilliant writing, I sometimes had to take a break from his woes as the victim also of less-than-loving girlfriends, weird jobs, his own mistakes.

If I had any doubt that men are in trouble, this book would have put them to rest. The women, once they’ve left their husbands, do well, but the men all flounder.

Still, I have to defend Trelawny’s sense of being a victim. I can’t speak to enduring racial discrimination, but I’ve been poor and Escoffery is right: when you’re poor, survival hangs by a most tenuous thread. If you have the emotional support of your family or your community or both, you can weave in some happy times, sweet moments, even a few successes. Without them, your outlook is pretty bleak.

As Trelawny says, “It occurs to you that people like you — people who burn themselves up in pursuit of survival — rarely survive anyone or anything.”

I am on the lookout for books of interconnected stories like this one, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, and Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Have you read a good book that uses that format?

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Negative Space, by Luljeta Lleshanaku

Negative Space

The title of this collection of poems by Albanian poet Lleshanaku intrigued me. The title poem, itself long and complex, about her childhood and the Cultural Revolution of 1968, a result of Communist Prime Minister Hoxha’s anti-religious policy of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s leader from the end of WWII until his death in 1985.

But I found a different perspective in the poem “Menelaus” where she writes using as a persona the Spartan leader who fought in the Trojan War under his brother Agamemnon and eventually married Helen after the sack of Troy. In Lleshanaku’s telling, not only is his ship becalmed on the voyage home, but actually never arrives in Sparta:

I continued to wander on open seas, forgotten,
on history’s waters . . .

Patris now doesn’t exist.
Not because of a curse from the gods,
but because with revenge
everything ends. The curtain falls.
And peace is never a motif.

“Patris” is the Greek word for homeland and of course also reminds us of Paris who started the war by stealing Helen. What I see here, though, is the enduring legacy of Albania’s civil wars, dictatorships, occupations, massacres, followed by four decades of communism and the empiness left after its defeat. How do you write about the traumas that shaped your life when they are over? In “The Deal” she talks about going home and all that has changed:

“I’ve come to write,” I explain.
“Is that so? And what do you speak of in your writing?”
asks my uncle, skeptically . . .

Only my eyes haven’t aged, the eyes of witness,
useless now that peace has been dealt.

What’s left in that negative space are the small, human things of life, beautifully rendered in other poems here, with a turn that lifts them out of the ordinary. For example, in “Small-Town Stations” she pulls us in with the first line: “Trains approach them like ghosts.” Then come the details, rousing our own memories of train journeys and what we see looking out at these stations. She ends, though, with a twist that makes us rethink the entire poem and the person narrating it.

This book is Ani Gjika’s 2018 translation of Lleshanaku’s 2012 and 2015 collections. As always, I wish I could hear the poems read in the original as well, since I’m curious about the musicality of the author’s poetic voice and am never sure how well it translates.

Regardless, I’m grateful for these translations that have given me access to these poems with their images upon images. They’ve stirred me into, not only remembering my own moments and reviewing what I know of Albania’s history, but also making me think further about the long-term effects of trauma, whether it’s systemic racism or the wars and dictators who are driving the many people deciding to try the difficult journey to another country.

What do you know about Albania? Have you read Lleshanaku’s poetry?

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A Fever in the Heartland, by Timothy Egan

Egan

I thought I knew pretty much about the Klan’s history. I knew that it was originally formed in the 1860s by Confederate veterans and tapered out a few years later. I knew that it surged back following the release of the blatantly racist film Birth of a Nation in 1915. But I had no idea how huge it became in the 1920s.

Egan tells a captivating story of D. C. Stephenson, a conman originally from Texas, who appeared in Evansville, Indiana in 1922 and, with no qualifications, set out to take over the state and eventually the White House. How? By appealing to the fears of ordinary white folks, stoking their anxiety about change and blaming their problems on Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The solution, he told them, the way back to that mythical, golden past was to enforce white supremacy.

“These were the people who held their communities together. They were not the criminal element, they were not the psychopaths, sickos and all that.” However, “A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping.”

Stephenson was thoroughly repellent. A cheater and serial rapist who got off on beating up women, his power grew as he quickly rose to the top of the Klan. “Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors—they all answered to the Grand Dragon . . . Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.” Egan says, “The Klan owned the state and Stephenson owned the Klan.”

He became rich by taking a cut of membership dues and other schemes. He bribed pastors to tell their parishioners they must join the Klan. He lied to everyone. “He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid.”

Within two years after his arrival in Evansville, he created a shadow government in the 1924 election. He controlled the General Assembly, the legislature, city halls, courthouses, police departments, and many protestant churches. And he had his army of 400,000 Hoosiers, loyal to the Klan and to Stephenson.

Egan is one of my favorite writers and this book does not disappoint. Vivid writing, solid research and a searing story made it a must-read for me. My only disappointment was that the subtitle—The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them—is misleading.

The woman is 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer, an employee at the Statehouse, who was raped by Stephenson in 1925. More than raped, but I won’t repeat the details here. Her “dying declaration” finally persuaded a jury of White men in a Klan-dominated town to convict Stephenson and send him to prison. Humiliated Klansmen began to quietly pack up their robes.

So, yes, she took down the Klan but not in the derring-do way implied by the subtitle. I wonder if that was the publisher’s work.

If I had read this book before 2016, I would have struggled to believe it. Surely he must be exaggerating, I’d have thought. A few people, of course, but one in three men in a state? How could that many people be so filled with hate, so blindly loyal to such a disgusting man, and so cruel to others? How could so many judges, politicians, ministers be willing to betray their oaths?

Well, Egan doesn’t explicitly draw the parallels with today, but he doesn’t need to.

Now I’ve learned how dependent we humans are on our social tribe and how hard it is to go against them or question their mores. I’ve learned that people don’t want to admit they’ve been wrong—the sunk cost fallacy—or that they’ve been the dupes of a conman. I’ve learned that some churches are out to take over the country and remake it with religious instead of civil rules, just like the Taliban. And greed can outweigh integrity.

Now, I see it happening again. The military-wanna-bes are just sad, but they are only a small part of this wave. I admire the brave journalists, rabbis, and prosecutors who stood up to Stephenson, at great cost. Today we too must stand up to protect democracy here in the U.S. I hope Egan’s book is a great awakening.

Have you read any historical nonfiction that has helped you understand today’s plots to take over the U.S.?

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Horse, by Geraldine Brooks

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This novel succeeds on so many levels. Brooks weaves together multiple storylines, with different narrators and time periods, ensuring that the story reveals itself smoothly.

We start in 2019 in Washington, D.C. A graduate student from Nigeria is working on a magazine article related to his studies in art history when he notices his elderly neighbor, the one who has always been rude to him, lugging heavy items—probably her late husband’s things—out to the curb. Theo goes out to help. She refuses but tells him to take what he wants. Politely he pulls out a dirty oil painting of a horse.

At the same time, in a Maryland suburb of D.C., Jess works for the Smithsonian running a lab where she and her team clean animal bones and sometimes wire them back together. Originally from Australia, she begins working with a scientist from England studying the skeleton of what was once the most famous horse in the U.S., a skeleton that has gotten lost in the Smithsonian’s storage units.

The we move to Kentucky in 1850 where we meet Jarret, a slave who has grown up with horses and has an amazing affinity with them. His father Harry, who has bought his own freedom and is saving up to buy Jarret’s, is the head trainer for the plantation owner’s racehorses. Jarret and Harry are with the mare when she gives birth in the night.

These are the main threads, but we also get the stories of the itinerant horse painter Thomas J. Scott who later volunteers with the Union army, a rebellious daughter of Jarret’s original owner, and the New York gallery owner Martha Jackson in the mid-1950s who specialises in modernist artists but finds a 19th century painting of a horse irresistible.

So, yes, this is a story about a horse, beautifully written, with leisurely scenes full of luscious period details. It is also the story of the United States, from the antebellum world to the present. Inevitably it is about what Wendell Berry called the U.S.’s hidden wound. Yet race is mentioned only as it is integral to the story, whether it’s an abolitionist dressing down his in-laws at dinner, the Talk that both the Australian and the Nigerian missed, or the chapter headings that identify the boy as Warfield’s Jarret, then Ten Boeck’s Jarret, and so on through the book.

For me, the story moves beyond race into thinking about those who want to achieve great things, whether it is a horse eager to run, a child who wants to be free to exercise his particular skill with horses, or an athlete such as a gymnast or tennis player, ballet dancers—the list goes on—and those who profit from them. There is much in the news about the dangers of playing football, the emotional and physical damage of pushing young athletes too hard, and the potential for abuse of young people who want to win. Yet they DO want to win.

The novel is also about science and art and where they intersect. Brooks stirs in us that peculiar pleasure that comes from hard, creative, purposeful work. Woven into the story, too, are the opportunities denied to the women of the 1850s and 1950s.

Brooks’s novel enthralled me, chores postponed as I plunged into each new chapter, savoring the texture of each scene, and moving easily between the different worlds.

Looking back, I’m surprised by the last item. I am generally not a fan of novels with multiple point-of-view characters, yet here the transitions are so smooth that I barely noticed. It felt as though we were all sitting around a campfire passing around a talking stick, taking turns to tell what is so clearly one story.

I particularly dislike the kind of omniscience that moves from one character’s thoughts to another’s in the same scene. Brooks rarely does this, but it’s smooth as butter when she does.

I’ve been studying one scene in particular between Harry and Jarret when they receive bad news. We start with Jarret’s thoughts, move into Harry’s, and then back into Jarret’s within the space of two pages. It works because there’s plenty of dialogue to anchor the scene, and the moments of transition are moments of high emotion so the shift feels right. Also, Brooks also uses action as a bridge in those two transitional moments.

Whether you are interested in horses or not, you’ll find much to enjoy in this novel. It is the story of us, what we strive for, and the price involved. There’s much to think about here.

Have you read a Geraldine Brooks novel that you enjoyed? What did you like best about it?

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On Interpretation

The first theater class I took was Oral Interpretation taught by the inimitable Esther Smith. If you ask anyone who was lucky enough to know Miss Smith, I bet they would tell you about the profound influence she had on their lives. She certainly did on mine.

The class was on how to work up a part based on a written script, i.e., how to interpret the text and deliver it in a way that conveyed your interpretation. One of the first things she said to us was about the three components of communication. I don’t remember the exact words she used, but basically the originator, the thing itself (book, painting, spoken words, etc.), and the person receiving it.

As a writer, I think about this often. I have control over the first two, but not the third. As a reader, how I understand a story or poem depends on me alone. Well, me and my cache of experiences, cultural contexts, predilections, etc.

I know what kind of experience I intend my story or poem to create in a reader, but they may get something entirely different from it.

What brought the idea of art as communication to mind was a recent review by Thomas Meaney in the London Review of Books, Vol. 45 No. 4, of an exhibit of George Grosz’s work at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

It actually was an illustration that struck me: Grosz’s Tatlinesque Diagram. You can see a reproduction of it here.

The description by Paloma Alarcó on the website of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, says that the woman is a prostitute, based on her connection to another collage, and says that the collage simply represents contemporary people of various sorts. The title refers to Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian and Ukrainian artist and architect who famously designed The Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin’s Tower.

Indeed, in his review Meaney quotes this artist statement from Grosz’s autobiography: “My drawings had no purpose, they were just to show how ridiculous and grotesque the busy cocksure little ants were in the world surrounding me.” Meaney does not mention the Tatlinesque Diagram in the review but does describe “Grosz’s great theme – the domestic horror show of bourgeoisie.”

The collage says something quite different to me. The first thing I noticed was the walking man’s turned head. I thought it clever the way his larger head continued facing forward, while a tiny head inside is turned to fix on a photo of a naked woman. A woman in the foreground has just passed him. She, too, is naked, though wearing a hat, a ribbon around her neck and thigh-high stockings. She’s furtively glancing back at the man who just passed her. We see a grinning man approaching her, his head shown in outline like that of the larger head of the other man. We are left to imagine what his inner head is doing.

What struck me immediately was how accurately this collage depicts the way it feels, as a woman, in a public space where men are also looking at depictions of naked women. It might be a calendar on the wall or something on a computer screen or even a cartoon. No matter how fully clothed you are, you immediately feel naked.

It doesn’t matter if that’s what Grosz intended or if he just meant to depict the world around him. That’s what the collage conveys to me.

The writing life is one full of rejections. I try to remember how subjective the reader’s opinion is. We all bring different experiences and mindsets to what we read. The first piece of mine that won an award is a good example. In the same envelope with a letter saying the piece had won first prize (yay!) was the critique I had paid extra for—obviously written by someone else—saying it was one of the worst pieces they’d read, and that I should take an introduction to creative writing course.

All we can do as a writer, actor, or artists, is create as best we can and put it out there in the world. Sometimes a reader will actually see something in a story or poem that I didn’t intend but am delighted to have pointed out to me. Here are two quotes from authors, responding to a request from a student as to whether that ever happened to them:

Ralph Ellison: “Yes, readers often infer that there is symbolism in my work, which I do not intend. My reaction is sometimes annoyance. It is sometimes humorous. It is sometimes even pleasant, indicating that the reader’s mind has collaborated in a creative way with what I have written.”

Joseph Heller: “This happens often, and in every case there is good reason for the inference; in many cases, I have been able to learn something about my own book, for readers have seen much in the book that is there, although I was not aware of it being there.”

Has something you’ve created ever been understood by others in a way you didn’t intend?

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Wild Girls, by Shirley J. Brewer

9781627204378

There were no maps for those of us who came of age at the beginning of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. Or rather, we threw them away, the ones that told us we could only work as a nurse, teacher, secretary, or domestic servant. The ones that said we had to find a man, marry, have children, and then confine our labors to kids and kitchens.

We were left having to create our own path, our own definition of what it could mean to be a woman. I read biographies of women artists, writers, and scientists looking for models.

My friend Shirley (full disclosure) discarded her Catholic schoolgirl veil and took on the world in sequins and a feather boa. Breezy and brave, with a heart as big as the Chesapeake, she sends us these letters from her world.

A chameleon, she revels in the brightest colors and slips into one woman’s heart after another: Libbie Custer (George Armstrong), Betsy Patterson Bonaparte (Jerome), Agnes Lake Hitchcock (Wild Bill), Annie Oakley, and others. She writes praise poems for Annette Funicello, her Aunt Alvina, and a clerk at Home Depot.

Imagination runs wild as she writes poems about having tea with Queen Elizabeth, a date with Richard Gere, and dancing with a museum guard. She even writes an “it” poem from the point of view of Marilyn Monroe’s lipstick.

Her ekphrastic poems—referencing the paintings that inspired them—remind us that the women depicted on these old canvases were real people, women who perhaps might like to exchange their ruffs and heavy skirts for a fuchsia gown with spaghetti straps. Daring, courageous, Shirley even does a takeoff on Rilke’s most famous poem.

She is a master at using humor in poetry. Many of these poems will make you chuckle and snort. But her passion is not only for glitz and glamour. Her elegies to people we know and those we didn’t until now hurt our hearts and remind us that we mourn together. Her empathy will not surprise anyone who has read her collection After Words, a series of poems on the 2010 stabbing death of Stephen Pitcairn, an aspiring doctor.

The brave poems in this collection define one woman’s way of being in the world. It is a way we can all appreciate and applaud and find ourselves in. She pulls off her magic through humor and compassion and turns that surprise us. She awakens the wild, original, and authentic selves that we know ourselves to be.

What poet’s work have you read recently that ignited your imagination?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

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Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus

Lessons in Chemistry

Garmus’s enormously popular book was this month’s choice for two of my book clubs. In early 1960s U.S., Elizabeth Zott is the host of a hit cooking show, but it’s not just any cooking show and she’s not just any woman. She’s actually a research chemist, though her scientific career has been stymied in ways that you can imagine a woman trying to succeed in a scientific field at that time would encounter. Or today, for that matter.

Having lost her job at the research institute, she takes the television job in order to support herself and her daughter. She approaches cooking as chemistry, e.g., “combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride,” an approach her female audience loves. They start studying chemistry textbooks and begin to find their voices.

If this sounds like a fairy tale, well, that’s what it is. Enjoyable: hilarious in parts, horrible and sad in others. It’s a fast read. And unrealistic, of course.

The idea of chemistry and cooking as a path to empowerment for women has its merits. Many women of the time were undereducated, including my mother who was denied her dream of going to college like her brother because her parents didn’t see any point to it.

However, women should think twice about emulating Zott’s path to success. Stubbornly sticking to your guns, telling misogynistic men who have power over you just what you think about them don’t always work in real life. You can’t count on rousting the misogynists by standing your ground. Force of will is not enough.

And don’t hope to become a champion rower on your first attempt by studying physics.

The many anachronisms contribute to the unreality of the tale. As one of my book club friends noted, Zott is like a modern-day woman transplanted into the repressive, pre-second-wave-feminism period. Plus there were several factual anachronisms, such as talking about defunding the police.

Another factor in the fairy tale atmosphere are all the coincidences. People keep turning up and returning and just happening to be right there when needed for the plot. Zott just happens to be gorgeous but doesn’t care or even notice that she is. She just happens to meet the perfect partner for her who—surprise—adores her back AND is a famous chemist. She has no degrees but is one of the most brilliant chemists in the world just from self-study. I could go on.

I wanted to like this book more. I did like it, once I accepted that it was a fantasy, despite some gruesome scenes. However, as a woman who worked in a male-dominated STEM field through the last quarter of the 20th century and well into the 21st, I had hoped for a more realistic picture of how to deal with the problems involved. Just snapping your fingers and having the magic happen isn’t really useful.

However, the misogyny itself is not a fairy tale, so I hope this story helps young people see how things were back then, and in some ways still are today, whether they want to believe it or not. I hope, too, that this story acts as a corrective to the rosy, nostalgic picture of the 1950s and 1960s being pushed by the radical right.

If nothing else, I hope it encourages young women to go into STEM fields. Yes, there’s still prejudice against women, but it’s also easy to demonstrate real, irrefutable competence.

If you’ve read this novel, what did you think about it?

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Living Diversity: Poems, by Lynn Martin

living diversity

Reading this chapbook is like opening a collection of letters from a friend. (Full disclosure: The author is actually a friend of mine.) They are full of the kind of sharing I most look forward to: Here are my experiences and my subsequent insights; how about you?

In one poem we get memories of childhood, the sounds of skipping rope and rhyming chants summoning the flavor of those days. Then comes the twist of the adult looking back, which aligns with our own shift in perspective from nostalgia to knowledge.

We learn about the author’s assembled family: a combination of adopted and birth children, all beloved. Within this family, a braid of Filipino, African, and Caucasian ancestries, love reigns. More children, in their diversity, touch on the author’s life: climbing a tree, riding a bicycle in wide, persistent circles. Her poems find what they have in common.

She brings a listening ear and open heart to every encounter, such as the one where she is giving away condoms to a group to help stem the surge of AIDS and instead gives us their stories, their fears and illnesses.

Her fresh take on the father leaving for war in 1941, and the resulting loss of home and friends for the second-grader left behind, brings alive the sense of exile from your own life that so many children and adults felt during the COVID pandemic. Yet there’s humor too: She titles the poem “Even Napoleon had a place to go.”

In persona poems, Martin inhabits various young characters, effectively bringing their voices into print. And in some she captures their music, as in “Babydyke Rapper” which begins “Jeans halfway down my ass / T-shirt belly button short.”

This is a fun and heartfelt collection that will set you thinking and perhaps listening more carefully. That’s how it was for you? It was much the same for me.

Are you reading poetry these days? What are some poems that have touched you?

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The Midcoast, by Adam White

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This debut novel takes place in Damariscotta, a small town on the coast of Maine. Andrew grew up there and has recently returned to teach at the high school. As the story opens, he and his family come to a reception for the Amherst women’s lacrosse team at the home of Ed and Steph Thatch.

As a teenager Andrew had worked for Ed at the Lobster Pound and is surprised by the lobsterman’s rise in the world, wealthy enough now to own this huge estate and to send his daughter to Amherst. Andrew had briefly met Steph as a teen and is equally surprised to find her practically running the town.

During the party, Andrew wanders through the Thatches’ house and notices some photos of a burned car with two bodies in it. An hour later, state police cruisers arrive. The rest of the story becomes Andrew’s attempt to learn how Ed and Steph got to this point, exploring his own memories, researching archives, and interviewing people involved.

Opening a story with the last scene is a technique that’s fine for an episode of a television drama. In a novel, though, I believe there are subtler and more interesting ways to create suspense. Still, there is much to like in this book.

Although the story moves around in time—delving into Andrew’s past and what he can reconstruct of Ed and Steph’s, skipping forward into the present where Andrew is considering writing a book about the couple—I had no trouble following it. The author does a good job with creating logical transitions and grounding each new scene in time and place.

Ed and Steph’s progress from blue-collar to the most powerful couple in town, from trailer to mansion, has larger resonances, something I always appreciate in a story. Ambition and the corruption that often accompanies it fill today’s headlines. Their story also reflects the changes Steph brings to the town to turn it into a tourist destination, creating what some natives find a false image.

The author actually grew up in Damariscotta, now living in Boston with his wife and son, so he is able to bring a wonderful level of detail to his depiction of the town and its people. I wonder, though, how the people who live there feel about the book, especially those who are portrayed as corrupt or sycophantic.

The story of a wealthy man with a possibly shady past narrated by a neighbor, naturally brings to mind The Great Gatsby. That’s setting a high bar for yourself as a writer! For me, Ed and Steph don’t measure up to Gatsby and Daisy. The Thatches seem like ordinary people, so I didn’t quite buy their epic devotion to each other, Ed’s seeming invulnerability, or Andrew’s obsession with them. More character development would have helped.

Still, the story kept me interested through to the end. Living now in a small New England town myself, I was especially intrigued by the workings of Damariscotta, such as the power mechanisms, the class conflicts, and the peculiar attitude toward those who return after leaving.

With elements of mystery and thriller, this book is solidly in the general fiction category. It’s an enjoyable first novel, and I look forward to seeing the author’s next book.

What novel have you read set in Maine?