Book Short
The Buoyant Letters of Mimsy Bell
By Laurel Dodge
By Stephanie Miller
This delightful slim novel hooked me from page one.
“Dear Gerald,” it begins. “The water into which I release this letter is not the same water in which you slipped away, though the river remains the same: Sinuous, deceptive, violent. Curse though she is, people still come from all directions to bob along on floats, ride her rapids, and dance and drink themselves insensate on her beaches as if she were tame. It’s said she takes three lives per year. A debt from a wrong done long ago. The year of your death she took only two. I‘d like to think you were so alive you counted more than one, that your sacrifice spared another.”
Mimsy, eighty years old, has returned to her New England hometown. If it was a real town, it could be in Maine, but may be in New Hampshire. After a hard and fast and drug-fueled life as a rock and roll star, she returns to the scene where her first and truest love died in a canoeing accident sixty-five years before. She collects a number of antique bottles, places a letter inside, and each day drops the letter in the river. Although known to be a fickle lady, Mimsy is sure the river will bring the letters to her beloved Gerald.
Sadly, you can’t return to a small town, especially one in which you grew up, without everyone getting all up in your business. Mimsy is feisty, slightly ornery, tremendously kind, and filthy rich. Everyone from the pastor of the church in need of repair to the busybody old ladies running the food pantry to the eager young cousin who wants guitar lessons is after Mimsy, drawing her into village life.
Told Through Mimsy’s Letters
The only viewpoint in the book is Mimsy’s letters to Gerald. It is a literary technique that I enjoyed very much for both what it reveals about Mimsy’s character and thoughts and what it leaves out. Through that limited lens we join Mimsy’s adventures including a love affair worthy of a rock star, becoming the unlikely best friend of the town’s only policeman, a few Hallmark moments, several disastrous and tragic deaths, and one sadness-infused birth. Throughout all, Mimsy remains steadfastly cantankerous, incredibly thoughtful, and brutally honest with Gerald.
We learn more about the long lost Gerald. Sigh at the beauty of their young, perfect love. Grieve and tantrum with Mimsy as she relives memories and discovers long kept secrets. Celebrate her friendships. She’s the kind of woman I would like to be (maybe without the drug phase). Or maybe, have for a friend and neighbor. Being inside the correspondence of Mimsy and Gerald is a beautiful and heart warming ride down a sunny, slightly heart-racingly rapid, and gorgeous river of words.
Micro Shorts
“The Orphan Collector“
By Ellen Marie Wiseman
Two very different women star in this novel of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Philadelphia, the first I’ve read by this author. One is young Pia Lange, the thirteen year old daughter of German immigrants living in the slums while her beloved father is off to war. Despite their poverty, there is love and warmth in the home. Pia’s special gift is a sort of sixth sense where she can tell by touching someone if they are diseased. She keeps it hidden by avoiding human contact, making her life lonely. Luckily, her newborn twin brothers are healthy and she revels in taking care of them. When her mother falls to the flu, Pia makes a fateful, desperate decision that leads to separation from her brothers, incarceration in a dreary orphanage, and finally becoming a servant in the home of a kind doctor.
The other protagonist is Bernice, living across the street from the Langes. She’s bitter. Her husband was killed in battle. Her only son is dead of the flu. She blames the immigrants who are taking jobs from “true Americans,” infiltrating the neighborhoods, smelling up the hallways with strange cooking, and not speaking proper English. She goes a little crazy – fueled by her prejudices and despair – and starts stealing children, especially immigrants.
Bernice is the most horrible of evil characters and Pia is the kind of plucky, moral, and clever protagonist we all love. I enjoyed the story very much, and despite the gruesome pandemic setting and the parallels to today’s American bigotry, this makes a great beach read.
“How to Read a Book”
By Monica Wood, Maine Author
This is a light, sweet story of three people who have big hearts and luckily find each other in a happy coming of age tale. I’m typically not a fan of this kind of romantic novel. But about three chapters in I got curious about how it would all work out.
Harriet Larson brings her teaching background and compassion to lead a book club at the women’s prison. Ex-con Violet Powell is released early and reconnects with “Bookie” as the prisoners affectionately called Harriet. And then there is the delightful, kind, forgiving, and compassionate Frank Daigle. He is a retired machinist whose wife was killed in the car accident that put Violet in jail. Along the way, there are some nice book discussions; a bit of insight into how a marriage can work when one partner is loving but not in love; a disastrous love affair that has all the makings of the horror scene in a movie where you shout at the screen, “Don’t open that door!!”; and (wait for it!) fascinating information about African grey parrots.
“Harlem Rhapsody“
By Victoria Christopher Murray
Jessie Redmon Fauset arrives in Harlem in 1919, leaving her job as a high school teacher in D.C. to achieve her dream of working as a literary editor of The Crisis, the Negro rights magazine of W. E. B. DuBois, who is also her lover. She turned the magazine into a powerful force for Black literature and poetry, launching the careers of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Nella Larsen, among many others. Every Black writer wanted to be published in The Crisis. So Fauset worked long hours to edit and guide them to create a magazine (and one for children) that inspires their Black countrymen, and even some whites, to the civil rights cause.
Murray does not shirk from showing the duplicity, misogyny, and arrogance of DuBois. The man was a genius and objectively one of the most influential Black men of the period, and clearly intelligent and professional people like Fauset nurtured that commanding behavior and deeply admired the man. Still, he seems in this novel to be kind of a jerk to be around.
Murray also highlights the incredible bigotry against Black women at this time. Despite their education (Fauset was one of the first to earn a PhD), achievements, and contributions, it was very hard for a Black woman to get a job outside of teaching, and Fauset, when leaving DuBois after five years as his right hand at the helm of a successful magazine, could never get a job in publishing again.
She is the author of several books, which I had never heard of (but have sought out). Indeed much of her story has been erased from history. Which is why historical fiction like this is so wonderful. It plucks unrecognized but fascinating and deserving people from history and shines a light on their lives and successes.
