Ann Hood

This novel begins in 1969, and as Peter, Paul and Mary croon on the radio and poster paints are splashing the latest anti-war slogans. Suzanne, a poet, lives in a Maine beach house awaiting the birth of a love child she will name Sparrow. Claudia, who weds a farmer during college, plans to raise three strong sons. And Elizabeth and Howard marry, organize protest marches, and try to raise their two children with their own earthy, hippie values. By 1985, things have changed. Suzanne, now with a M.B.A., has taken to calling Sparrow "Susan." After personal tragedy, Claudia spirals backward into her sixties world—and into madness. And Elizabeth, fatally ill, watches despairingly as her children yearn for a split-level house and a gleaming station wagon. In this beloved, critically acclaimed first novel, Hood's clear, brave, and penetrating voice captures the spirit of three friends struggling to resolve their lives in a complicated time warp called lost youth.

A Novel

Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine

Sarah Sammis

In an interview on Suite 101, Ann Hood describes writing her debut novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine long hand during long flights. She was working at the time as a flight attendant. Knowing the circumstances of how the book explains for me the dominant theme of the book: the resurfacing of memories, good and bad in a time of personal reflection.

The novel begins with Sparrow, a teenager, wanting to know about her father. To her, he is only a man in faded photograph. She wants to meet him. She wants to get away from home, from her mother who has decided to start calling her Susan. Sparrow's not the only teen in this book looking for something. There are others, all of them children of women who went to college together in the 1960s.

The book then goes back in time to the mothers to tell their stories. At first I was reluctant to continue, afraid that the book would lose its meditative tone in lieu of nostalgia. Thankfully it doesn't. These moments in the pass are fleeting, the years jumping from memory to memory.

Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine can be read either a chapter a night or in one long sitting. The chapters stand apart, working almost as self contained short stories. Together though they do build a portrait of friendship, memories, loss and grief over twenty five year's time.

Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine A Novel

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