Guest Book Review: IN DEFENSE OF GOOD WOMEN

 

When Pamela Grath invited me to review a novel by a local Michigan author, I knew the book would be good. But, as it turns out, In Defense of Good Women, by Marilyn Zimmerman, is remarkably good. In fact, once I started reading this compelling, suspenseful story, I couldn’t put it down. 

 

In Defense of Good Women is a legal thriller that tackles the controversial topic of neonaticide, the killing of an infant within its first twenty-four hours. This fascinating book features strong, complex female characters and an evocative portrait of a coastal town in southeastern Michigan.

 

The lead character, Victoria Stephens, is a smart, accomplished criminal attorney with a twenty-year career. In the small town of Port Huron, she projects a perfect image of success with her Chanel sunglasses, designer shoes, and new Mercedes. At the insistence of a chief circuit judge she has known for years, Victoria reluctantly takes on a seemingly impossible case. 

 

The client, seventeen-year-old Callie Thomas, has been charged with murdering her newborn infant. The baby was drowned in the St. Clair River, hours after being born. Callie insists she is innocent. She does not remember giving birth or even being pregnant, though the DNA evidence is indisputable. Adding to the uproar, Callie is the daughter of a locally prominent Evangelical minister, known for his strident pro-life opinions.

 

As Victoria constructs a defense, she consults a psychologist with expertise on neonaticide syndrome, a kind of dissociation that occurs in women, particularly teenagers, who have been traumatized by their pregnancy. Closely related to temporary insanity, the syndrome is a controversial diagnosis that is not exactly abortion and not exactly infanticide. The woman wants to get rid of the baby after it’s born, and then she’ll block it from her mind, as if the baby never existed. The hypothesis would explain a lot about Callie’s behavior and frame of mind, though the expert admits that the defense may not work in U.S. courts.

 

The story has several unexpected twists that I won’t spoil. But I will say that Zimmerman is brave and even-handed in confronting tough issues related to pregnancy, motherhood, and the expectations that weigh on women facing difficult decisions. She also does a fantastic job of developing her lead characters. Callie is traumatized and reticent, but she’s also sensitive and artistic. And Victoria, even with her Jimmy Choo shoes and diamond wristwatch, is a complicated woman who carries wounds of her own. By its conclusion, the novel resolves the mystery of what happened to the baby and to Callie. But there is a deliberate raggedness to the ending that is startling and thought-provoking.

 

The book effectively captures the ambience of small-town Michigan. The media turmoil, the rumors and judgments, and the intertwining lives are all recognizable and believable. Especially captivating are the descriptions of the cozy cottage Victoria inherited from her father. Constructed by bootleggers during Prohibition on the St. Clair River, the home conjures memories of her parents and has become her sanctuary. 

 

Like most great books, In Defense of Good Women works on several levels. With its crisp pacing, compelling characters, and suspenseful plot, the book would make fabulous beach reading. On a deeper level, it would also be a wonderful choice for a book club seeking meaningful discussion around women’s reproductive health and the right to choose.

 

Thank you, Pamela, for sharing this book—and for all you do to inspire community and introspection in beautiful Northport. And thank you, Marilyn Zimmerman, for writing such an intelligent, entertaining, and timely book. I hope you’re already at work on your next manuscript!

Postscript from your usual blogger: First, thanks to Kristen Rabe for being an excellent guest reviewer! Second, we will be hosting a launch in June for Marilyn’s book—details to be announced when plans are firm.

Elsewhere, Elsewhen

Green moss in winter

These things are no more, and the feeling I am telling here … may have perished, too. It felt like the tide had gone out and taken all the ships with it, and you were left on a shore, a debris.

 

-      Niall Williams, This is Happiness

 

I had no celebratory plans for St. Patrick’s Day, either for the day itself or for the preceding weekend. Saturday would see me in my bookshop, and maybe Sunny and I would get up to the dog park on Sunday, if the weather didn’t turn wretched, but forebodings were somewhat against us. Ay, that’s March!

 

Without thinking, anyway, of St. Paddy on—was it Thursday or Friday? No matter—I picked up a paperback novel with blurbs on the back cover looking good enough that I thought I’d give it a try. I needed a new bedtime book, having stretched Olive Cook’s Breckland out about as long as possible, setting it aside repeatedly, both to read other books (both fiction and nonfiction) and also to make it last, then returning to it time and time again when sleep eluded me in the wee small hours, until finally, against my will, I reluctantly reached the last page. 

 

So now I would read Niall Williams’s This Is Happiness. At least, I would begin the novel and see if it held me. And now, to say that it did hold me did is to make a massive understatement.

 

The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality. 

 

The narrator, an old man—well, exactly my own age!—is recounting a time much earlier in his life when, as a lad of seventeen years, he left the seminary in Dublin with lost faith and went to live for a while with his grandparents in a remote Irish village during the time that electricity, long promised to the village, came at last. The manner of its coming is not incidental to the story but woven into its essence. Here is the man who has come to the village of Faha to supervise the installation of poles and lines:

 

Everybody carries a world. But some people change the air about them. That’s the best I can say. It can’t be explained, only felt. He was easy in himself. Maybe that was the first thing. He didn’t feel the need to fill the quiet and had the confidence of the storyteller when the story is still unpacked, its snaps not yet released. 

 

And here are the strains of music woven into the story:

 

The quiet of country life can sit on your heart like a stone. To lift it, to escape the boundaries of myself awhile, I took down the fiddle.

 

One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that, and unlike the clear-edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound-map even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that.

 

So now, thoroughly charmed and engaged, I read myself to sleep on Friday evening and again when I woke in the dark hours of Saturday morning, but only when dashing off an e-mail to my sisters on Saturday afternoon from the shop and mentioning the book did I realize what a timely choice I had made. Irish! How appropriate!

Woolly bear woke up on Friday!

The temperature rose to 70 degrees in Northport on Saturday, and the sun shone bright, but the wind blew like the devil, gusting up to 50 mph. (So much for my having swept the sidewalk with the push broom two days before!) Sunshine brought people out of their houses, and the wind in Traverse City—worse than we had in Northport, I was told—sent some of them clear up to Northport, so it was a fairly lively bookshop day, and only late in the afternoon, while a couple from Ann Arbor were happily browsing, did the power go out on Waukazoo Street. First the lights flickered, then went out briefly and came back on again, that happening two or three times, until finally they stayed off for good. Luckily, my happy customers were undeterred. We had a meeting of hearts and minds as their choices were books by Wendell Berry and Robert Reich. Closing up then, I only hoped the power would still be on at my house when I got home.

 

It was not. No lights. No furnace. No pump.

 

But I was prepared for a power outage with two deep stockpots filled with water and a brand-new, long-handled lighter so I wouldn’t need to risk fingers by lighting the stove with a match. Right away I lit my two fat candles and sorted through the collection of oil lamps for one with a good wick, cleaned the glass chimney, and filled the reservoir with oil. Success! The power company thought electricity would be back on by 3 a.m., I was at first dubious, but a look at the overnight forecast showed the winds gradually dying down, so maybe….

 

But we would be fine, Sunny and I, and now my reading choice struck me as even more appropriate. I had only reached Chapter 18, not even the halfway point of the novel, and while Noel’s grandparents had a crank telephone, the only one in the village, no one yet had the promised electricity. That was the fiction. Meanwhile, here in my “real” world I was all set with candles and oil lamps and a cell phone with 80% of its charge. Wind blowing demonically around my old farmhouse, dog lying across my feet, I felt a strong sense of kinship to the people of my own grandfather’s native land, back in times that were difficult and challenging in many ways but much simpler and probably more satisfying in others.

I haven’t said a word about the slowly unwinding plot of Williams’s novel and won’t get into that now. For me, it is the world of the story that matters. Early in my reading of it, I snapped a photo of the cover to send to my stepdaughter and texted her this brief message: “I am elsewhere. It is beautiful and restful.” So then, continuing my reading, I was struck by the passage quoted above about the Irish reels defeating time and space. Elsewhere! Yes!

 

Another of my Saturday customers was a young woman who said that if she could have a superpower, it would be to travel back in time for a day, not to intervene in history but simply to be there in that time. She agreed with me when I remarked that such is the magic of books. 

 

Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday morning in the United States in the year 2025: Snow sifts in shifting veils from the barn roof. I am elsewhere, elsewhen.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all, Irish or otherwise.

Sunday morning...

...snow in Leelanau.

Forty-five Years Later?

 

On Waukazoo Street in Northport, Michigan

First, some bookshop news and blog notes:

 

Reminder: Dog Ears Books is open four days a week this winter, Wednesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

 

Reminder: you can order audio books through Libro.fm and choose Dog Ears Books as your bookstore on the Libro.fm site, and we will earn a little something from each audiobook you buy that way. It will help us get through the winter. Thank you!

 

Blog note 1: This blog, Books in Northport, has been around since September of 2007. It has always been free and will be free as long as it survives. I make my living as a bookseller, not as a blogger. Neither will I be moving to a Substack account, although many professional writers and independent journalists are there now, and I encourage you to follow a few, upgrading to a paid subscription if you can afford it, especially those whose work is crucial to giving us real news, e.g., Dan Rather, Heather Cox Richardson, and others. The importance of these sources will increase sooner than you might imagine.

 

Blog note 2: Call my blog a “labor of love” or call me a graphomaniac – however you want to characterize it and/or me, I’ve stuck to this project for over 17 years. Some of you have been with me from the beginning, while others are brand-new readers, but I appreciate every single one of you, however long you have been reading. My morale this year, however, could use a little extra support (I’ll be trying to provide support for the morale of my readers, too), so I encourage you to (1) sign on as a follower, (2) comment on posts, and (3) send links to your family and friends for posts you find particularly meaningful. There is no financial advantage to me in this, only personal satisfaction.

 

That’s it for bookshop hours, audiobooks, and blog! Now, for some book thoughts --.

 

Still relevant!

George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, an “instant classic,” first appeared in 1949 and hung over us like the sword of Damocles for 35 years. When the fateful year of his title passed, we in “the real world” heaved a sigh of relief. It didn’t happen! We’re still free! Did we then become complacent? Oh, gripes about government continued, with “Big Brother” now used as an epithet. It took until 2019 for worry about corporations keeping tabs on us to start catching up with worry about government. In 2023 concern over corporate surveillance surpassed the worry about government. 

Where are we now? Is Big Brother watching us? Follow-up question: are Big Government and Big Corporations separate? 

 

In Orwell’s novel, was the fictional Big Brother an individual modeled on Stalin or a figurehead personifying the ruling party of the totalitarian state? Follow-up question: Does it matter? 

 

In the novel, there is no life of significance without Party membership, and for Party members there is no such thing as private life, as they are frequently reminded by ubiquitous posters and ever-on telescreen messages: “Big Brother is watching you.” Is it ironic or just pitiful that Americans in the 21^st century have not waited for the government to install telescreens in homes but rush to put their own personal lives online in videos for all the world to see, even grooming their toddlers as video stars? Follow-up question: How will that play out in the future of those children? 

 

Admittedly, this blog of mine has not been restricted to book reviews and bookshop news, and over the years I’ve shared quite a bit of my personal life, from photographs of my dogs to an account of my husband’s death and my cross-country trip home to Michigan without him. It's been kind of a memoir in installments. (This blog is not AI-generated. I am a real person, as well as a live bookseller.) I do, however, maintain a degree of privacy and intend to keep it that way.

 

January 30, 2025, Up North

However, back to the book --.

 

Winston, the protagonist in 1984, lives in constant uncertainty and fear. He doesn’t have to worry that he is breaking the law because there is no law! There are only bad thoughts. But if he is suspected of having them (as we pretty much know from the beginning he will be), there will be no possible defense. He is guilty when accused, accused because guilty, and all that remains is for him to confess and name names, specifically the name of his lover, since he is not supposed to have a private life. But no, that’s not all he has to do. He can’t just give a name. He must be broken. 

 

We Americans in 2025, forty-five years after the date Orwell's book predicted world totalitarianism, can keep our lives relatively private if we choose to stay offline and buy local with cash. All of us can do our best to seek truth and hold onto it in a whirlwind of public lying and stories that change from one hour to the next. Certainly we can ration our viewing of “reality” videos and so-called “news,” even completely unplugging for days at a time. 

 

All that done, even so, it’s hard to live in a country whose leaders have turned their backs on law. 

 

When, as now, in the last week and a half, the rules change day by day … and people appointed or elected to run government are not restrained by laws or held accountable for breaking them … and individuals formerly in positions of authority are persecuted because they believed in and followed laws and testified against law-breakers … then, with or without constant surveillance, with or without thought police continually monitoring our posture and facial expressions, we have been taken hostage by the world of 1984.

 

And yet--. And yet--. 

 

This morning on a back road I came upon a pickup truck that had run off the road and was half-buried in deep snow, and a little way up the road a man was walking. “Is that your truck? Do you need a ride?” He did. 

 

In the afternoon the sun came out and shone for hours, and our cold northern Michigan world was so beautiful. Shadows on snow are so beautiful! Sun on snow is so beautiful! 

We can still help each other and see beauty in the world, and each one of those small moments is important. Each such moment is resistance to tyranny.

 

In the wake of the Wednesday night air tragedy that resulted in the loss of 67 lives, the Blamer-in-Chief wasted no time in pointing the finger—in an absurd direction, naturally. It is his way. He does not want Americans to come together, either in joy or in sorrow and certainly not in understanding and love and mutual aid. Instead he wants all eyes fixed on him, his followers’ eyes in endless admiration, his opponents’ eyes filled with fear. He incites hatred, constantly whipping up frenzies as Americans with different agendas consider each other from across the political and moral chasm he keeps digging, very intentionally, deeper and deeper. He’s got the whole country in a dire game of the prisoner’s dilemma, and as long as he can keep us from joining together, he will keep pulling the strings and jerking us off-balance.

 

I must believe more people will finally see his naked narcissism and incompetence when it begins to affect their lives--although when hardships fall on MAGA families, of course he will tell them it’s someone else’s fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. President Harry Truman’s famous motto was “The buck stops here.” In the DJT White House, the buck doesn’t have time to catch its breath before it's thrown in someone else’s face. And it’s hard not to react to the absurd nonstop blaming with anger, but we cannot live every waking moment in outrage. It’s important to deny the Blamer his childish satisfaction. It’s also important for us to continue to love each other and love the world, our poor, broken world.

 

What helps you remain hopeful about our ability to heal the world? What strategies do you have to contribute to healing yourself and others? For putting the pieces back together again? To mend the world? 

P.S. Watch this. She pretty much covers everything, where I only gave sketchy hints.

Are You a Romantic?

Every business day, I get a newsletter called “Shelf Awareness” in my e-mail, delivering the latest news from the world of books, bookshops, booksellers, libraries, writers, and publishers. When owner-booksellers retire, a shop either closes or comes under new ownership. Sometimes, beforehand, there’s an announcement of a shop for sale. 

 

I’ve always kind of wondered how the numbers compare, old shops closing vs. new shops opening. It’s hard for me to tell, because I get both kinds of news. Also, shops like mine, selling majority of used books -- or some may sell no new books at all -- often don't get counted. But I can’t help noticing lately how many new shops are opening with a plan to specialize in romance books. 

Romance readers are coming out of the closet, no longer hiding their reading preference as a guilty pleasure. According to the New York Times, print sales of romance books almost doubled in only three years, from “18 million copies in 2020 to 39 million in 2023,” and specialty bookshops have boomed along with the books. 

 

When it comes to genre fiction, I generally reach for mysteries. Although now and then I yield to the temptations of potato chips and “chick lit” (usually stories featuring bookshops or set in Michigan), in general science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance do not usually appeal to me. Don’t get me wrong! I have no quarrel with the readers of these genres. (Some order their books through my shop!) When it comes to escape reading or what I call “comfort books,” there are different roads for different tastes. 

My taste: A country road

My own choices in comfort books tend more in the direction of children’s or teen novels I remember loving years ago (Palmer Brown’s The Silver Nutmeg; Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series; Anne of Green Gables and the sequels; or Farley’s The Black Stallion or Marguerite Henry’s wonderful horse stories) – or, other times, novels or memoirs set in the past (most recently, Mary Webb’s enchanting Precious Bane). Little Women is a book I still find romantic, despite its formulaic construction. When Jo and the professor finally kiss under the umbrella (absolutely NOT in the balcony of a theatre, as one modern film version has it!) and speak their simple words of love to each other, how could any love scene be more moving than that?

At Dog Ears Books TODAY!

Years ago, as the young, stay-at-home mother of a toddler, I fell briefly into a romance habit at an old bookstore in Traverse City, Arnold’s on Union Street. Many will remember the place. Mrs. Arnold had an almost unlimited stock, it seemed, of paperback novels featuring young women in love and newly wed, all written by a writer named Kathleen Norris – not the Kathleen Norris (b. 1947) of Dakota but an earlier KN (b.1880). Those books were definitely like potato chips: always another! After a while, though, I started to become annoyed. All the young, beautiful heroines grew ever younger-looking and more beautiful in their times of trial and poverty! How, I wondered, did that work? But a much more annoying trick of the author’s was her repeated reach for a deus ex machina to dissolve the heroine’s deepest existential problems.

 

Let’s say (as often happened) that the main character married a handsome ne’er-do-well who could not support a family, perhaps even turned out to be an alcoholic. Divorce was unthinkable in the Kathleen Norris code of morals! No, her heroine could absolutely not choose divorce, even with a “Mr. Right” standing in the wings! That left the novelist two possibilities for reaching a happy ending: either the inconvenient husband could die, or it could be discovered that the marriage, for whatever reason, had never been valid in the first place. Either way, the beautiful, long-suffering protagonist was set free to marry the loyal, upstanding man who had loved her so chastely all along. Mighty handy! Perhaps a little too handy?

Also available -- and only $9 each!

(One of the charming side features of Ms. Norris's novels was the California setting. The main character always had a garden and always made wonderful little suppers of fresh vegetables.)

 

Such were the romance novels of the early 20^thcentury. (When I reluctantly confessed this stretch of my reading life to my mother, she shrugged and said airily that she had read many Kathleen Norris books. I had no idea!) Romance readers now expect more in the way of “sizzle,” it seems. A very different, protofeminist view of romance, broadly understood (see below), can be found in the sometimes-strange novels of the sometimes-anonymous Elizabeth von Arnim. 

 

Years ago, when I announced myself to the world as a romantic pragmatist, a fellow philosopher friend said divorce had cured her of romance, but by romantic I didn’t mean hearts and flowers and Valentine’s Day dinners. I had in mind the older, broader sense, that of the Romantic period in art and literature: a return to nature, valuing feelings along with facts, even striving toward “impossible” goals. 

My romantic meadow: native grasses, wildflowers

The Artist understood. Once he and I talked about the most romantic books we’d each read, both having in mind a novel clothed in mystery and something like fantasy (though not ‘fantasy’ as the genre called that is understood today). His was Hudson’s Green Mansions; mine was (I’ll give the English title) The Wanderer, by Alain-Fournier. When I described the French novel to David, it reminded him of Hudson’s book, and when I read Hudson’s Green Mansions for myself, I could see a similarity with The Wanderer, a similarity not in the stories or settings but in a dreamlike mood the two books shared.

 

What does the word ‘romance’ mean to you, and what do you think of as a ‘romance' -- or a 'romantic' novel? Is romance in your mind a narrow genre – and if so, does it appeal to you? If you read in the genre, who is your favorite author, and why? Or do you look for romance in the classics – say, Jane Eyre? Or maybe you see 'romance' as I do, following the period of art and literature known as Romanticism. There are no wrong answers!

 

But heavens! So many questions! Will anyone be brave enough to answer any? I only have one friend who says she never reads fiction, so I won’t expect a comment from her....

 

Next question: What do you think explains this surge in romance reading? I’ll tell you what I think one reason is (not that anyone asked). I think the gruesomeness of American politics at this juncture in our history is sending people of all ages, more and more, to romance and fantasy and all manner of speculative fiction. The real world is too much with us! How can we even sleep at night? As for me, I have now hit my bottom line, and I’m digging in my heels, and here it is: 

 

I’ve refrained from name-calling, treated those whose views oppose mine with respect, sent love to all, but now I’ve reached the end of my rope, because the bottom line as I see it is that no matter what anyone’s most dearly held opinions are about the economy, about immigration, about abortion, about the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine or equal rights for all Americans, about minimum wage or social security or the cost of health care, affordable housing or the border with Mexico, the composition of the Supreme Court, the existence of the Electoral College, space travel or cryogenics — whatever anyone’s views about any of these or any other issues may be, putting a sociopath in the White House (for the second time!) is not the answer. Crazy is not the solution to a single problem. Crazy rights no wrongs. And if you vote for crazy, you cannot, in truth, call yourself sane or good or righteous, regardless of how often you go to church or pray over your dinner table. 

 

Should I have thought longer about making such a public statement? Crawled back in the closet and prayed about it some more? Kept quiet lest I hurt someone’s feelings or lose a friend or put my business in jeopardy? There is too much at stake.

 

(And by the way, if you vote third party or don’t plan to vote at all — because you think the Democrats’ candidate is “just as bad” or you see her as a warmonger — the effect will be just as if you had voted for crazy, and you know it, so don’t pretend otherwise. You’ll be putting crazy back in the White House, so don’t expect “policies” of any kind.) 

 

So I'll say it again. Crazy is a solution to nothing. Crazy rights no wrongs. Crazy is what the rule of law, with all its human flaws and shortcomings, is designed to prevent. And I am enough of a romantic that I have not given up hope for this country – my country! – that I love and for our beautiful world.

To my Republican friends: 

If your biggest concern is eliminating abortions, and you don’t care about anything else if only you can accomplish it, work toward that end. Devote your money and time and energy to providing pregnant women with support. If you’re most worried about the gun industry's being allowed to continue to market and sell military-style assault weapons to civilians (whether you own stock in the industry or believe you would be able to defend yourself against the U.S. army and U.S. Navy and Air Force if you and the government disagreed — whatever!), spend your time and energy and hard-earned income on that issue. But don’t vote for a lying sociopath and trust him to make your dearest dreams come true. That has never been his mission. It’s HIS dearest dreams that matter to him, and nothing else, and there is more honor among thieves than there is in DJT’s promises.

"Donald Trump is not cognitively fit to be president. The presidency is a position that requires an occupant able to act strategically and carefully. That Trump is not such a person is obvious if you watch the man. And so, for years, his supporters have said: Don’t watch the man. Don’t listen to what he says. Look at the results. But those results reflected the power and ability of others to check Trump, to inhibit him when he could not inhibit himself. It is not just the man who is now unfit; it is the people and institutions that surround him.” - Ezra Klein, “What’s Wrong with Donald Trump?” 10/22/2024

It’s worth looking up and taking the time to read or listen to Ezra Klein’s whole piece. It’s in the New York Times but also available as a podcast from many, many online sites you probably use. His basic point (for those who will not follow through on my suggestion) is that Trump isn’t any different from what he ever was, so it’s not senility we should worry about. The reason there weren’t more disasters during his presidency was that there were people holding him in check and, when necessary, not acting on his orders (e.g., to cut FEMA funds to California because Californians were not his diehard supporters), whereas this time around, should he be elected again, he will be surrounded only by loyalists and sycophants, and there will be little restraint on his impulses. 

 

To all:

You didn’t expect this abrupt change of course in today’s post? Neither did I when I set out to write about the surge in romance novels and bookshops. But here it is, all of it, and there’s a little more on one of my other blogs, “Without a Clear Focus,” a piece on my #1 most beloved philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose birthday was October 18 and someone I take as an exemplar.

There. I've said my piece. Bye-bye for today.

Annes and Islands, Dogs and Dog

 

A Different Anne, a Different Island

 

Anne of Green Gables was one of my mother’s favorite books (others in the series among that group), and I have written before of my copy of Anne's House of Dreams, once my mother's own, but I have long wanted to read the story of a different fictional Anne, a novel not set in Canada’s Maritime provinces, but, at the beginning, at least, right here in Michigan – that is, up in the Straits of Mackinac, on Mackinac Island. Constance Fenimore Woolson, great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, born in Massachusetts in 1840, was a great traveler. Besides visiting the Great Lakes, she also traveled to Florida (her mother lived in St. Augustine), England, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, and was buried in Rome upon her death (possibly from suicide) at age 54. Stories in Woolson’s collection Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches are set predominantly in the Great Lakes, where the author had a particular attachment to northern Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Mackinac Island. 

Anne, a novel often identified as feminist fiction, opens with the eponymous young woman’s life on the island, her mother and stepmother both having died and her father having faded into a dreamlike, unremunerative idleness. Still in her teens, Anne is in charge of a household that includes four little half-siblings, three boys and a strange, fey little girl. When the father also dies and Anne learns for the first time how perilous is the family’s financial situation, she realizes also that she must prepare herself to make a living, and so, several chapters into the story, she enrolls in a private Eastern school for girls.

Woolson describes characters' looks and dress in detail, as she does the landscapes and worlds of her fiction. The glories and riches of the fur trade are already past by the time of Anne’s Mackinac Island, but the fort is still manned, island economy restricted to fishing and subsistence farming (both seasonal occupations), while shipping is conducted by sail and steam. The novel, Woolson’s first, was published in 1880 and is a window into late 19^th-century America, in general, as well as into its main character’s life and character. 

 

Reading about Woolson and her work, one regularly encounters quite subjective notes. An article in The New Republic, for instance, leads off with this sentence below its title:

 

Constance Fenimore Woolson wrote bitter, morbid, and severe fictions, but her devotion to James was her undoing. – Max Nelson, “Betrayed by Henry James,” March 1, 2016

 

(Well, Henry James -- there was a cold fish, eh?) Lehigh University, on the other hand, notes that “Woolson was a literary success almost from the start,” while Britannica emphasizes that the author’s works of fiction were “particularly notable for the sense of place they evoke.” That last comment captures my reasons for wanting to read this book.

 

I am not yet halfway through Anne so cannot say if I will find the novel “bitter, morbid, and severe” in its later chapters. Anne’s great-aunt, to be sure, is a horrid person, but the Frenchwoman who heads the school Anne attends is a darling and manages the great-aunt (who has agreed to pay for a single year of Anne’s education, with no added frills!) with Gallic charm and diplomacy. I’m wondering at this stage in my reading if Anne’s fiancé will prove true to his promise – but also wondering if Anne herself is really in love with him or if she will find someone else. And what will be the role of the sly little half-sister as the story unfolds? 

 

If you have read this novel, please do not answer any of the questions I have posed above!

 

 

Northport Dog Notes

Northport Dog Parade 2021

Dog Parade is this Saturday! No, Sunny Juliet (a.k.a. Naughty Barker) will not be in it, but if you want to participate with your dog and be eligible for prizes, please don’t wait until Saturday morning to register! At least, don't try to register at Dog Ears Books on Saturday, because registration forms I have will be picked up at the end of Friday afternoon. Pre-registration is $5 per dog, and registration on Saturday is $10 per dog. That's if you want to be eligible for prizes. 

 

(More) Dog Notes

 

Sunny and I did much better this week at our agility session. That is, Sunny was a star, a champion, and I didn’t make as many mistakes as usual, which helped her shine. We have some new routines to work on at home, where fun with tennis balls is as much of a reward for her as dog treats. How she loves to leap for tennis balls! Now, if only she could work up the same enthusiasm for a Frisbee – and maybe in time that will come, too. 

Field Notes

 

My meadow is gay with dancing daisies and swaying grey-headed coneflowers, apples are reddening on the trees, and ripening blackberries tempt Sunny Juliet to harvest them one by one with her dainty dog lips. Mornings are quieter, August (unlike June) not ringing with dawn birdsong as summer begins to wind down.

Invasive but beautiful loosestrife is blooming in ditches and narrows. It really is lovely and can’t help its nature, and who can resist the name? Loose strife! Begone, dull care!

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February 9 seems early, even for hellebore.
 

(Always) More Garden Thoughts

 

Other than a few remnant patches here and there, our snow melted and evaporated, leaving bare, squashed grass, weeds, and last autumn’s fallen leaves, a tired palette not at all brightened by a string of grey, overcast days. Cold wind didn’t help, either. During an unseasonably warm spell, my sturdy hellebore dared to put forth blossoms. Will they survive, now that the temperature has gone back below freezing at night?

 

Friday was busy in the bookstore, Saturday not, but a cheery surprise awaited me at the post office: my seed order had arrived! 

Small packages hold big dreams.

It may not look like much, but my kitchen garden is small, so I tried not to get carried away, because besides these packets I’ll be starting tomatoes from seed and, as usual, buying other plants as my budget permits. Oh, frabjus joy! Another year of gardening! More planting and weeding and watering and pruning and moving things around in the endless search for the right placement for all -- the doing as rewarding as the results, if not more so.

 

Seeds to start indoors --

Six weeks from last frost date. As I see it, that means it will be mid-April when I’ll have to rearrange my home office to make way for seed trays and pots in the big south-facing window. Meanwhile, at the bookstore, the big pot of parsley continues to thrive, as do geraniums, asparagus fern, and citronella. Citronella has small pink blossoms! Not showy, but still, it’s cheery and encouraging at this time of year to see any kind of blooms. The citronella will go back outdoors for the summer, but perhaps I should break off some leaves now to take home and deploy as mouse repellant? Because a couple of those little devils made uninvited indoor appearances recently....

 

 

More Book Thoughts

 

Since my last blog post (which was shorter than usual, with not a single picture of my dog), I’ve continued to think about Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel, The Waters, in connection with Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. A novel is fiction, a memoir nonfiction, so that’s an important difference, not to be forgotten, and there are others. For example, The Waters puts a woman in the driver’s seat, as it were: Hermine Zook, the healer, dominates the island as well as the hearts and minds of her daughters and granddaughter. Westover, on the other hand, despite relationships with her mother and sisters, is ruled over (as are the mother and sisters and brothers) by her father in more ways than one. Her brothers play major roles in her life, as well -- for better or for worse.

 

As for similarities, here I’ll quote what I wrote a few days ago: “Yet in both stories, unlike as they are in so many ways, there is a family isolated from its own surrounding community, as well as from the larger world; a young girl, hungry to learn, who is kept out of school; a mother who knows herbs and how to take care of babies; and violence, an omnipresent threat, that breaks out from time to time without warning.”

 

Continuing to think about both stories, the fictional and the actual, has led me to watch several interviews each with authors Campbell and Westover. (I’ve linked two here, and you can find many others by searching online yourself.) One thought since my last post (this came from the linked interview with Campbell) is how important choice is to the women we meet in both stories. As in life, much happens that was not chosen by Tara or Hermine or Rose Thorn or Donkey, but in other moments and situations they did make choices, sometimes considered for a long while beforehand, but not always. Sometimes impulse gave voice to feelings that had been simmering unrecognized beneath the surface until the moment they burst through. 

 

Tara’s father made many choices for her before she became strong enough to know what she wanted for herself, and the same was true of Donkey, with her mother and grandmother deciding her fate for years. Is personal growth is a paradox or a feedback loop? It is only by making choices that we become ourselves, and at the same time we have to gain knowledge of ourselves in order to be strong enough to make choices that we need to make.

 

(Campbell seems to be having a wonderful time with her book tour travels and visits, and she has certainly earned every bit of the attention she’s getting. Also, as she herself notes, it doesn’t make sense to spend years working on a book and then not do everything possible to get it into readers’ hands. Westover’s memoir was a sensation when it first appeared in 2018, and she was a national phenomenon, appearing everywhere, so if she has chosen to disappear from the public eye for a while, as it seems is the case, one can hardly wonder at that decision.) 

 

The question of home, like that of choice, looms large for Tara in the memoir and for the women of M’sauga Island in the novel. Molly and Prim have left the island to live elsewhere, and Molly wants her mother and Donkey to move off the island, too, but Hermine would not be at home anywhere else, and the four adult women are “more themselves” when there, together, the author tells us, even when they are at odds with each other. For Hermine and Donkey, the relationship to the natural world in which they live is as important as Rose Cottage. But Donkey needs a larger world, one that includes school – and boys and men.

 

Tara Westover had to leave her mountain home to go to school, and she wanted to go much more than she wanted to stay, and yet the mountain pulled her back over and over again. In “the end” -- of the memoir, that is, which isn’t “the end” of her story, of course, since she and family members are all still alive -- she had to lose half her family, including both parents, in order to be true to herself. It was interesting, however, that in one of her appearances (on a podcast called “Mormon Stories”), two of her aunts and a cousin showed up to support the decisions she had made.

 

Q. If Tara Westover were to read The Waters (and I hope she will), would she think Campbell romanticized rural isolation and the life of a child kept out of school and away from doctors, despite the violent incidents that take place in the novel?

 

Q. If Bonnie Jo Campbell were to read Educated (and perhaps she has), I’m sure she would point out differences between the Westover family and the Zooks, but would she also see parallels in the strength that both Tara and Donkey needed to make their own way in a larger world?

 

I keep searching out interviews with both authors and will continue to think about their stories, I’m sure, for a long time to come.

 

 

More Dog Reports and Thoughts 

 

Two years ago I often called her "Tiny Girl."

Sunny and I have been to the dog park in Northport a couple times in the past weeks, and she has made some new friends, human and canine. The last time we were there, she was one of four dogs (about an ideal number, as far as I’m concerned, at one time), the others a hound named Gilbert (who chases soap bubbles) and two Labrador retrievers, but Sunny Juliet was the only one of the four with any interest in chasing tennis balls. I thought of my sister saying that their Labs have never been big on chasing balls, and for the first time it occurred to me that while Labs are “retrievers,” they are bird dogs, and the hunter does not throw a bird for the dog to bring back! Ah, but then I remember a friend’s golden retriever, who would chase and bring back tennis balls for as long as anyone could be persuaded to throw them, so – small sample, no conclusions here. Any thoughts on this burning question?

 

As for why a dog like Sunny, bred for herding, would care for tennis ball play, I have no explanation, and neither can I venture a guess why she behaves like a terrier – dig! dig! dig! -- whenever she senses a mouse or mole in a pile of brush or underground. 

 

Oh, and then there is her fascination with wild animals that take refuge in our old, ramshackle barn! Birds and feral cats and skunks, you name it. Sunday morning she had a mild skunking, what I call a "skunking-at-a-distance," i.e., not so strong as to bring tears to human eyes but still not a smell I would want on my bed, so out came the Dawn detergent (2 T), hydrogen peroxide (1 quart), and baking soda (1/4 cup) for a deskunking bath (need to renew those important supplies), plus a strip of bacon to lure her into the bathtub. She was not eager but didn’t make a big fuss, thank heaven. Important note: The deskunking mixture must not be mixed up ahead of time and/or ever stored in a closed container! But if you have a dog, it’s a good idea to have the ingredients and recipe on hand.

 

Afterward, she was full of smiles and wiggles and so much energy that I gave her three of the calming treats that would have been helpful, maybe, an hour earlier. Supplies have since been restocked, but I do have to hope that Sunny won't go back for more skunk experiences any time soon!

None the worse for her experiences!