Delightful ‘Moon Loon’ evokes childhood magic

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors, set in the Pine Tree State or with other local ties.

MOON LOON, by Sandy Ferguson Fuller, Down East Books, 2004, hardcover, 32 pages, $15.95.

If the whimsy of childhood has been forgotten, “Moon Loon” will bring it back home in a hurry.

Sandy Ferguson Fuller has captured the poetry and wonder of being on a freshwater lake in the summer in a way that will make her book a modern classic. The beautiful blending of color and imagery in the illustrations and the simplicity and cadence of the writing give the book a magical quality that children and adults alike will love, even though it may be for different reasons.

The story of the loon is told as the musings of a young girl, through which the peace of being at a seasonal lakeside camp scoops up her audience and carries it along for the journey.

The tone is set immediately with a drawing of a camp perched on the edge of a lake with the forest towering behind it, a wharf jutting out from the shore, and a loon in the water, stretching its wings in the moonlight. “Loon beneath the silver moon, when I hear your haunting cry it always makes me wonder … why?” The suggestion of the girl sitting in the cabin, thinking about what is going on at night on the lake, is visible in the illustration.

The young girl and her dog companion, although nameless throughout the book, do not feel like strangers. The girl’s experiences and feelings are familiar and comfortable. Maine families, whether year-round or seasonal, can relate to the settings for her mental journey – the kinds of places that become the special highlights of childhood.

With simple prose, Fuller triggers memories of the reader’s own experiences, making it easier to know the characters in a personal way. The illustrations, which carry the vivid and soft suggestive qualities of pastels, contribute to the character development in a way that is believable and fanciful at the same time.

“Oh, how I wish that we could dive together, just for fun,” writes Fuller, as the illustration shows the girl pinching her nose to go under water where she is swimming in front of the wharf, while her faithful dog friend swims toward her with a toy in its mouth.

“Moon Loon” is very reminiscent of another good bedtime classic, “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown. Both books have the same soothing tone, the same sense of wonder and finality of the day.

I found myself thinking about the book in the day-dreamy way it was written, taking comfort from its tranquility long after I had read the last page.

– By Julie Murchison Harris

MAN BITES LOG: THE UNLIKELY ADVENTURES OF A CITY GUY IN THE WOODS, by Max Alexander; Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2004; 264 pages, paperback, $14.

There are people in Maine who find books like this sickening, but I’m not usually one of them. “Man Bites Log: The Unlikely Adventures of a City Guy in the Woods” is a collection of short essays, apparently modeled half on E.B. White and half on Emmet Meara, detailing Max Alexander’s life after moving from New York City to a farmhouse on a lot of acres he bought somewhere near Camden.

If this latter fact does not tell you something painfully obvious, you may want to skip this review and just go read the book, because its stories, anecdotes and observations may seem to you, as the subtitle states, pleasantly “unlikely.” But if you know the immediate implications of a person’s ability to drop everything and buy a house and 150 acres within sight of water near the midcoast, then pay attention.

The essays in “Man Bites Log” are meant to sound simultaneously funny and profound, and indeed there is eccentric wordplay throughout, cheerfully ironic – and familiar – anecdotes about snow, mud, gravel pits and town meetings, and crisply drawn caricatures of laconic Mainers. Reading the essays is like driving too fast in a go-cart. Each one careens around various hairpin puns to a sudden ending, and the sentences crackle like ladyfinger fireworks the whole way, which maybe is to be expected since Alexander is a freelance writer whose main outlets, including People magazine and TV Guide, have made him wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of many Mainers.

Although he doesn’t see it that way. He is constantly wondering where he’s going to get the money to, for example, build a new barn, or buy maple syruping equipment, or drill a new well, or dig a pond, and then usually finds it. It’s not clear he ever realizes that intimate communication is basically unachievable between nonlottery winners who have the cash to buy a farm near Camden (then rent a second house in Camden; see below) and people who are doing well if they clear $400 a week. That someone could miss this seems unlikely to me, but there it is:

“I exist in my own world, neither here nor there – disconnected from the tourists who recall my previous life, yet not really able to let go and just hang out with the locals. I stay home a lot.”

In fact, the unlikeliest thing in the book is the author himself. He seems to view himself as part frontiersman (which is tiresome because the 21st century hasn’t actually skipped Maine) and part nebbish (which is entertaining because he takes himself far less seriously than other transplants who have shouldered the solemn burden of explaining Maine to themselves, and us). Take, for example, his family’s response to the various harshnesses of winter. They feel so lonely in the farmhouse that they decide to close it up during the cold weather and rent a second house in Camden. This move is unlikely enough in itself, but further, to avoid damaging the wooden floors in the rental house, they give away the family dog.

Most of this is presented in a good-natured way. There are many jokes, most of which have less Down East bite than Emmet Meara’s, and there are many literary gestures, all of which are less carefully developed than E.B. White’s. Apart from the laughs, the most a Maine reader is likely to gain from these essays is a glimpse of the mind that comes here from points south and thinks it has migrated to the edge of wilderness. The primary audience for “Man Bites Log” lives hundreds of miles up west of Kittery.

– Dana Wilde