THE COLLAGIST
Karen Holmberg
Karen Holmberg ’88 makes her fiction debut with The Collagist, a beautifully written coming-of-age novel that is part magical fantasy and part realistic adventure. Fifteen-year-old Romilly’s mother died of a strange fever years ago, and since then her father has become more and more withdrawn. All is not well in the village where they live, and a series of bizarre and terrifying events—from her beloved uncle’s inexplicable disappearance to the enormous Being she sees opening a flap in the sky—send Romilly on a quest to discover the meaning and connection behind them. Sensing her father’s own terror, she begins to realize he holds the key to family secrets and hidden truths that will help explain what is happening, and she must convince him to break down the wall around himself and reveal what he knows. With deeply developed characters and poetic natural descriptions that anchor her story in place, Holmberg has created a compelling narrative.
THE CULINARY PHARMACY
Lisa Masé
While suffering from a chronic parasitic intestinal infection she couldn’t overcome, Lisa Masé ’01 was driven to take a closer look at her body and its relationship to food. She thought about the simple, traditional foods she was raised on in Italy, wondering what about them was so special and nutritious, and she came to the realization that they contained seasonal ingredients with medicinal qualities. Reverting to this ancestral diet, whose benefits worked toward helping cure her disease, Masé went on a journey to learn all she could about intuitive eating, the science behind our body’s processes, and the wisdom traditions surrounding food. The resulting message on how to cultivate wellness through food weaves together three ancestral healing philosophies—Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and the Mediterranean diet—with modern nutrition science. The book is filled with information about how to create your own nutritional wellness plan and includes numerous delicious recipes to try out.
UNFINISHED SPACES
Susan Hunter
Unfinished Spaces, the new volume of poetry from Susan Fritsch Hunter ’71, is a journey into the past, a window into the present, and a tentative glimpse into the future, exploring aching moments with beloved people and places. In “Nantucket,” Hunter recalls the moment with her father when she was “a girl with brown hair pulled back, / lying in a field of daisies, holding one” and she realizes the true nature of her parents’ relationship, with “too many jagged edges / of the very young / didn’t fit together, / unthought-out words, / casual in their catastrophe.” In “The girls’ room,” she conjures what is left without the girls, noting “The clothes that didn’t go with them hang / in all the dusty rooms that dot the seacoast / where guests sleep, glancing at biology papers and bunches of fake flowers.” Her poems travel to memories and moments from Cape Cod to Andalusia, Spain, to Guadeloupe and Arizona, and into rooms filled with memories of both birth and death. Thoughtful and spare, Hunter’s work is an evocative meditation on the journey of life.
ART OF PENOBSCOT BAY
Carl Little and David Little
The latest art book from writer Carl Little, MA French ’86 and his brother, David, focuses on the fascination artists have had with Penobscot Bay in Maine over the past two centuries. With its natural beauty, quaint villages, and maritime history, the bay area has inspired countless artworks since the 1800s, and the Littles have gathered an impressive collection for their book, Art of Penobscot Bay. As they say in their prologue, when envisioning this book “we set out to follow artists, from history and those painting now, in their visual explorations of the myriad inlets, islands, coves, and peninsulas…” The early paintings of the historical section are included chronologically, while the contemporary sections take a geographical tour. Whether you have been to the bay or not, you will be able to appreciate the various styles of interpretation these artists have brought to its beauty and uniqueness and thoroughly enjoy the presentations offered by the Littles.
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