89 pages
Published 1896
Read from November 3 to November 5
Rating: 4 out of 5
I went into this slender volume knowing little about it, beyond its date of publication (I want to pad out all my pre-1900 tags) and its setting in a small village in coastal Maine. It turns out to be an exquisite series of loosely connected vignettes, as our narrator sketches one villager after another in careful, beautiful phrases. It’s altogether charming.
The only sign of the book’s age is when it occasionally follows one of its character sketches a bit too far and gets lost in the weeds. (There’s also some unfortunate stereotypes spoken about South Seas islanders. Guess we can never have anything from the nineteenth century eschew bigotry entirely.) Otherwise, Jewett’s writing seems at least thirty years ahead of its time, crisp and modern and evocative. I was reminded, perhaps inevitably, of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.
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