Imagination Vacation
A dozen novels to deepen your Maine sense of place
By Amy Paradysz
Fiction takes me to all the places—and times—I’ll never go. Early America’s wild West. Ming dynasty China. Europe during the World Wars. And it takes me farther afield than my life is likely to go—from The Great Alone of Alaska to The Exiles of Australia.
But it also takes me deeper into this place called Maine that I call home.There’s something comforting about reading fiction set in a place I know. When the ferries are yellow and red, a downtown bookstore is named after a poet, and “aye-yuh” is an affirmative response marking someone who has been here longer than me, I recognize my world. Maine fiction set firmly in real places (even if they have fictionalized names) adds layers to my experience of this magnificent landscape. And what better to read at the beach, the lake or a camping trip in the woods—or on my front porch, watching the traffic drive by—than a page-turner by an author I’m likely to cross paths with, eventually, in this big small town we call Maine?
A Piece of the World
BY CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE
📍 Cushing, Knox County
“Christina’s World,” the iconic painting by Andew Wyeth, one of Maine’s most well-known painters, is the inspiration for this emotionally moving novel firmly grounded in Knox County. What’s the story of the woman in the pink dress dragging herself uphill toward her dilapidated house? How did Christina Olson and her remote farm in Cushing become Wyeth’s unlikely muse? Starting with what is recorded in history, Christina Baker Klein imagines the life of a recluse who achieves fame in the art world.
The Berry Pickers
BY AMANDA PETERS
📍 Not far from Bangor
In July 1962, a Mi’kmaq family makes it annual trek from Nova Scotia to Maine for blueberry picking season.It’s just like every summer—until 4-year-old Ruthie disappears. Joe, just 6 that summer, was the last to see his sister and never stops looking for her. Meanwhile, a girl named Norma—an only child in a well-to-do Maine family—suspects there’s something her parents aren’t telling her. But what? This popular novel by a writer of Mi’kmaq ancestry explores love, loss and identity.
The Frozen River
BY ARIEL LAWHON
📍 Hallowell
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812, by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, is a Maine nonfiction classic—fascinating but definitely scholarly. Kudos to novelist Ariel Lawhon for once again shaking the dust off Ballard’s journals and bringing colonial Hallowell to life in this meticulously researched novel—which is also a page-turner of a murder mystery. One my favorite books of all time.
Just East of Nowhere
BY SCOT LEHIGH
📍 Eastport, Washington County
Boston Globe journalist Scot Lehigh grew up in the fishing community of Eastport—the eastern most “city” in the nation—and brings his hometown to life in his debut novel in which three teenagers try to find their way in an adult world. It’s a fast-paced narrative full of characters as complicated as real people.
Little Great Island: A Novel
BY KATE WOODWORTH
📍 A Downeast Island
Everyone on (fictional) Little Great Island knows everything about everyone else—or wants to. Their lives, after all, are intertwined—an ecosystem unto their own. The lobster catch is down (climate change and all) and the McGavins plan to “retire” to the mainland before they’re too old to collect paychecks elsewhere. But then their long-lost daughter Mari shows up on their doorstep with a little boy. This new release is a pleasure to read right from the start and should be the Maine beach book of the summer.
How to Read a Book
BY MONICA WOOD
📍 Portland, Windham, and a fictional mill town
Despite its title, this isn’t a “how-to” book—though a careful reader can find some advice on reading (and living). At the core of this novel’s extraordinary cast of characters are a lonely teacher who leads a book club at the women’s prison, a book club alum named Violet who is adrift after serving 22 months for a drunk driving accident in which a woman died, and a handyman coming to grips with the fact that he didn’t really love his wife... who was killed in Violet’s accident.
Landslide
BY SUSAN CONLEY
📍 A remote island, Portland, and a mill town
The “Landslide” here is of the Fleetwood Mac variety, asking “Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?” Like Stevie Nicks’ lyrics, every line of this novel feels true. Universal. Even if you’re not a documentary filmmaker wintering on a literal island with two semi-feral teenage sons while your fisherman husband, forced by financial strain, joins a commercial boat in Nova Scotia that happens to blow up.
Lungfish
BY MEGHAN GILLISS
📍 A Maine island, probably in Casco Bay
A young mother—and the reader, along with her—slowly pieces together the circumstances that have led to her family’s desperate struggle for survival on an uninhabited island. She looks to the island itself for sustenance (foraging bladderwrack, green crabs and rosehips), occasionally going ashore (to what seems to be Portland) with both hope and trepidation. Through short vignettes, this novel poses the question, how far will love and loyalty go?
The Space Between You and Me
BY JULIE TRUE KINGSLEY
📍 Blueberry country
If you’re looking for something on the light side, this young adult novel is a charming coming-of-age story set among blueberry barrens. Every scene with Clem and Rico sparks with young romance. But the thing is, he’s got a secret that could tear them apart.
The Remedy for Love
BY BILL ROORBACH
📍 Western Maine
They say no good deed goes unpunished. With the “Storm of the Century” looming and everyone in line at Hannaford, a lawyer pitches in to help a ragtag young woman pay for her groceries then helps her carry her bags home—which turns out to be a deserted shack deep in the woods. Terrifying, heartbreaking, romantic and funny, this page-turner is the most unlikely of love stories.
Sunrise and the Real World
BY MARTHA TOD DUDMAN
📍 Just north of Ellsworth, Mount Desert Island and Portland
At rural Sunrise Academy, a residential treatment center for troubled teens, recent college graduate Lorraine enters a world of abused and angry teens, forbidden romance and simmering tension. That world comes crashing down when two staff members are murdered on a camping trip. Decades later, Lorraine is writing a book about her friends’ death and follows a lead... right into a trap.
This Other Eden
BY PAUL HARDING
📍 Malaga Island, Phippsburg
Rather than historical fiction, this lyrical narrative falls under a looser category of being just historically inspired. This part is true: For generations, a small interracial community peacefully eked out a modest existence on a rocky island at the mouth of the New Meadows River. Their white neighbors judged them harshly for indiscretions like use of tobacco—and decided that a hotel would be better use of their land. In 1912, under the governor’s direction, the 45 mixed-race residents were forced off the island, many of them institutionalized at the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded in New Gloucester, and the rest scattered to the winds.
On the Cover: Maine’s local flower market is blooming, thanks to a new collaboration of Maine flower growers and buyers.