Kate Braestrup and Robert Klose in the Mindful Reader

I review books by two Maine authors in this week’s Mindful Reader column in the New Hampshire Sunday News. Kate Braestrup’s new memoir is Anchor and Flares and Robert Klose’s hilarious send-up of campus politics is Long Live Grover Cleveland.

Here’s the first paragraph for each:

Kate Braestrup is chaplain to the Maine Warden Service. Her new memoir, “Anchor & Flares,” deals with all of the things she’s written about before – family, love, grief, faith – and also service. Ranging across topics as diverse as the condition of a body that has been decomposing under a frozen lake and a study of the qualities shared by Germans who rescued Jews rather than turning a blind eye to the Holocaust, Braestrup talks about hope and despair, joy and devastation. And she writes of these things in the context of her eldest son’s decision to enlist in the Marine Corps.

and

University of Maine biology professor Robert Klose’s novel “Long Live Grover Cleveland” is a delicious farce. Grover Cleveland is a small college in Maine, founded during the Vietnam war by a distant relative of President Cleveland as a haven for students – and some faculty – who want to avoid the draft. When the college’s founding president dies, he designates his nephew Marcus Cleveland, a used-car salesman in New Jersey, as his successor. Marcus is a good salesman who doesn’t seem entirely in touch with the world.

You can read the entire column here.

 

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Colorful Journey by Sue Anne Bottomley

Artist Sue Anne Bottomley‘s book Colorful Journey: an Artist’s Adventure: Drawing Every Town in New Hampshire got me out of a reading funk. I’d lately found myself dissatisfied which much of what I tried to read for pleasure — something that seems to happen when work reading overwhelms. Reviewing books pile up, I have limited time to read, and I end up feeling very choosy. I liked the idea of this book — a project, born of an artist’s desire to get reacquainted with her home state after forty years. Following through on a project like this had to be challenging, and I admire Bottomley’s perseverance.

Colorful Journey is part art book, part travel diary, part guide to tidbits of New Hampshire history and culture. It took Bottomley two years to visit and draw all 234 towns and cities in the seven regions of our state, and the book gives a page to each, with the pencil/ink/watercolor pictures taking up most of the space. Her style is fluid and colorful, and in the text she calls attention to the way she composed her drawings, when she took artistic license, and what details drew her eye.

In the process, patterns emerge — there are many interestingly re-purposed meeting houses and railroad stations around the state, many cozy general stores, well laid out town centers, and decoratively designed libraries. A lot of New Hampshire’s steeples are topped with weather vanes. Mills abound as well, and it’s interesting to read about all the ways they are being used today and what they produced in their time.

The accompanying text adds even more local color, as Bottomley recalls what she saw as she sketched, what the weather was like, who she saw or met, and sometimes what she ate. For each town there is also a fact laid out in a different font and another set in larger, bolder font. I am usually not a fan of more than one font on a page, nor of such variety of type size and strength, but it really works in this book, and the design seems to add to the reading — you can just look at the art, catch the highlighted facts, and move on, or you can read more closely.

I love New Hampshire, where the Computer Scientist and I feel most at home of all the many places we’ve lived. I find that despite it’s small size, it’s hugely interesting, and this book reminded me of bits of history, geography and culture that make it that way. I also learned that most towns seem to have changed names as well as borders at one point, and one even declared itself a sovereign nation (The Republic of Indian Stream, now Pittsburg) when its people tired of being taxed by both the U.S. and Canada. And of course I loved that Bottomley visited and drew so many libraries.

Whether you live in New Hampshire, vacation here, or just want to learn about it — we are, after all, soon to be on the national stage again as the “first in the nation” presidential primary state — enjoy this beautiful, informative book.

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Lucretia Grindle’s The Lost Daughter in The Mindful Reader Column

This week in The Mindful Reader a terrific historical novel-police procedural by Lucretia Grindle. Here’s the beginning of the column, which ran in today’s New Hampshire Sunday News.

The Mindful Reader: Finding Italy in ‘The Lost Daughter’

By DEB BAKER
The Mindful Reader

Boston native Lucretia Grindle lives on the Maine coast as well as in England. In the afterword of her new novel, The Lost Daughter she explains that after 9/11, she and her husband talked about “what they would choose to do if the world were going to fly to pieces.” Grindle recalls saying, “I want to go to the Uffizi. If World War III is going to break out, let’s go to Florence.”

That decision turned out to be the first of many trips to Italy, which she calls “one of the most intellectually rich, vibrant, and contradictory countries in the world. . . .” Her extensive travel has inspired several novels.

“The Lost Daughter” is set in contemporary Florence and late 1960s-1970s Ferrara and Rome. It’s both a mystery and a historical novel, examining the years when Italy was in the grip of the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigade, a militant leftist group. When the book opens, the story is focused on a 17-year-old American student, Kristin Carson, who’s studying art history in Florence and has a much older boyfriend she met online and knows only as Dante. When her prominent and well-connected orthopedic surgeon father and her stepmother fly to Italy for her 18th birthday, they learn she has disappeared.

You can read the rest here.

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