Island Reading

Ever get the feeling that your setting is too perfect? That any moment a fictional character will hail you or a conversation starts that you know how will end? I had that being trapped in a novel feeling this past weekend. We visited a friend on Sheep’s Island in Cundy’s Harbor, Maine. Although I needed to wear a ski parka in April, the day was glorious. There was the obligatory black lab, the murmuring pines, the loons fishing out front, and the trio of gulls hovering as they rode the breeze. The men all left by boat to inspect the camp that Monty’s building on a nearby island. I was alone and at peace. I could hear a lobster boat around the bend of the island as I sat on the porch, the disembodied voices mixing with the gulls’ cries. (And I knew what the gulls wanted as I had to climb across that very boat to get to the dock and nearly stepped into the box of very aromatic bait!) Suddenly, I knew I had the wrong book in my hand. I was wandering the Lakes District with Beatrix in Miss Potter (921 POT) when I should have been lost among Sarah Orne Jewett’s unforgettable characters in The Country of the Pointed Firs (SC JEW.)
Or perhaps I should have been re-reading Stern Men (FIC GIL) by Elizabeth Gilbert about the feud between two neighboring Maine Islands over fishing rights by the local lobstermen. Ruth returns from boarding school to work as a stern man, caught in the escalating feud until the day she catches sight of Owney Wishnell, lobsterman extraordinaire. She is an unforgettable heroine in a very funny novel of love and class.
My book group recently read a mystery set on an island far off the Maine coast, The Body in the Ivy (FIC PAG) by Katherine Hall Page loosely based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It was a good read but probably better saved for a rain lashed day on the island, like the four following our departure. Sitting on a table in the cabin was Dorothea Benton Frank’s Isle of Palms (FIC BEN.) The book was intriguing but I can’t start something I may not be able to put my fingers on to finish. Fortunately, I found a copy in our library, the perfect choice to take when we return in May.