Bill Roorbach’s first book a real winner

SUMMERS WITH JULIET, by Bill Roorbach, Houghton Mifflin, 292 pages, $19.95.

I’ve just had a delightful reading experience that I’d like to share with you.

Sometimes in reviewing books for this newspaper, I come across a real winner — a keeper.

First-time author Bill Roorbach’s “Summers with Juliet” is such a book, and with the right publicity and direction, I think this one just might become a classic.

This is something from an age gone by. It is something from all of our lives, but it is profound enough to survive generations to come.

Roorbach, an associate English professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, pens a love story of sorts — a love story so diverse and complex in nature that is defies description. Within the book’s 292 pages, he falls in love with a wonderful girl named Juliet. He falls in love with life itself in the form of nature and, ultimately, he learns to love and appreciate himself.

He is a poet extraordinaire. He is a man blessed with a talent to explain his surroundings and apply their significances to the realms of his own heart.

On the surface, the book appears to be a travelogue — remote summer journeys to far-off places where two young lovers play out their dreams and fantasies, maturing together toward a lifelong relationship.

Roorbach has been called a young Thoreau in love, but he emerges as much more than that. At times, he is Hemingway, a thinker, establishing a moral code for each character in the book to survive this dilemma, life.

At times, he is Faulkner, boldly chronicling a style of life that frightens him, as if the attitudes of much of surrounding mankind have narrowed so bleakly that it scares him. He shivers in fear at what some men are capable of doing and becoming within the simple realms of daily life.

At times, he emerges as a nature writer, surprisingly accurate in detail and description of fish and fowl as he and Juliet explore the many offerings of the wilds.

Bill Roorbach and Juliet Karelsen become hero and heroine in their quest to conquer and claim all of nature’s offerings.

How you will love Roorbach’s Juliet.

She is a summer breeze who claims the troubled soul of a man whose depth of character acts simultaneously to make him champion all the good of life, all the while questioning and evaluating too many of its contradictions along the way.

By book’s end, the reader will fall in love with Juliet too. We come to know her and her moods. We come to appreciate what our past and present loves are in our own scheme of things, and often in admonishing her lover, she admonishes all of us. Perhaps this is Roorbach’s real power as an author.

I don’t know this writer personally, but I would like to have the opportunity, for I have a hunch in meeting him, I’d find the same pleasure I found within the pages of “Summers with Juliet.”

Don’t miss the chance to read what many already are calling a treasure.

Ron Brown is a free-lance writer who resides in Bangor.