What’s new on Maine’s bookshelves? Essays, history, suspense and mystery

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

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

“SMALL WORLDS: ADOPTED SONS, PET PIRANHAS, AND OTHER MORTAL CONCERNS” by Robert Klose; University of Missouri Press, 2006; 188 pages, trade paperback, $19.95.

Robert Klose, associate professor of biological science at University College of Bangor, has contributed hundreds of down-home essays to the Christian Science Monitor, among other places, for two decades, and many of them are collected together in “Small Worlds.” They cover everything from Klose’s two adopted sons and his biology students to the quirks of Maine and Russia, the joys of music, and the eccentricities of language, to mention just some of his recurring topics.

These essays have a cozy, familiar feel, which no doubt is one reason Klose has won the Maine Press Association award for opinion writing four times. They convey vivid, touching stories of Klose’s adventures as a single dad, from his harrowing forays into Russia for adoption proceedings to the transition into American consumer life. They bounce around Klose’s own past as a college professor, a traveler to the Balkans, Costa Rica, Germany and Iceland, and a seemingly hopeless clarinet student.

Klose’s observations on Maine are fairly typical updates to the Maine Explained literary genre, and are part of a subgenre made up of writings by people who did not grow up here. Sensitive to the distinction, Klose repeatedly admits he’s a New Jersey native. But having lived in Maine since 1981, he feels tightly enough bound to explain pretty confidently what’s going on. In an amusing piece on Uncle Henry’s magazine, for example, he concludes: “It’s a wonderful thing to live in a place where nothing ever goes to waste.” It’s homely and warm-spun, just the way we like people to think of us. Although the word “wonderful” suggests a possible lack of contact with a certain inner winter here that is noticeable, maybe, in the number of half-junk cars and pickups going to waste in multitudinous Maine dooryards.

But who’s counting? Klose loves Maine, he loves his sons, and he loves his job, and this all comes through in ways that will make you love his essays too, most likely, if you don’t think about them too hard late at night. Which can waste a lot of time and lead directly into junkyards of the mind that only those of us who grew up here ever visit, apparently.

“MAINE: DOWNEAST AND DIFFERENT: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY” by Neil Rolde; American Historical Press, Sun Valley, Calif., 2006; 288 pages, large format hardcover, $32.95.

Journalist and former state legislator Neil Rolde has accumulated a reputation over the years as a popular nonacademic historian of Maine, and “Maine: Downeast and Different” is his latest among 10 books covering broad ranges of the subject.

It begins at the beginning with a summary of the prehistory of this part of the world, and ends at the end (or at least, at 2006) with notes on recent developments. There are speedy synopses of all the major and many minor events, from Samuel de Champlain’s explorations through Dummer’s War of the 1720s, the Margaretta battle in Machias and Capt. Mowatt’s bombardment of Portland during the Revolution, statehood in 1820, the development of logging and shipbuilding industries, Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War, big-time politicians Fessenden, Blaine and Reed, Prohibition, and so on through admiring passages on Edmund Muskie and Margaret Chase Smith and a lot of quick hits on other high-visibility postwar Mainers such as Stephen King, Carolyn Chute, James Longley, Joan Benoit and Tim Sample.

The most interesting parts, from a history buff’s perspective, are the early and middle chapters on Maine’s more distant past. Nearly half the book, however, is devoted to the last 60 years, and while timely, a lot of the politics, economics and fast-forward summaries of pop Maine culture become fragmentary and hasty-seeming. The last roughly 50 pages, “Chronicles of Leadership,” are made up of a series of homages to banks, insurance companies and other moneymaking enterprises, and while they’ll create great self-congratulatory feeling among the business proprietors and their families and colleagues, they’re massive dead weight for the rest of us; decades from now people will look at this (appropriately designated) Chapter XI and wonder if life at the turn of the millennium was really that boring.

“Maine: Downeast and Different” is well illustrated throughout with photos and reproductions of old drawings, and features a fun-facts timeline at the end. The text is energetic – reading it is like zipping around the cove in an outboard. Since it covers everything at this pace in fewer than 300 pages, it’s a sort of prototypical coffee table book that might even be suitable for eighth- or ninth-grade history students. If they can stay afloat through the end.

BY DALE MCGARRIGLE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

“IN THE BELLY OF THE BLOODHOUND,” by L.A. Mayer, Harcourt, New York, 2006, 528 pages, hardcover, $17.

Once again, the Corea resident’s spunky creation, Jacky “Bloody Jack” Faber, finds herself in a mess of trouble that’s more than a little of her own making.

When she last was seen in “Under the Jolly Roger,” Jacky was sailing away from the bloody battle of Trafalgar, where she had lost many of her mates.

When she finally lands in her adopted hometown of Boston, Jacky discovers that she’s wanted by the Brits for her past actions. So this privateer goes undercover, returning to the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls, which has been rebuilt after it burned down in the series’ second installment, “Curse of the Blue Tattoo.”

“Bloody Jack” refining her skills as a proper lady is a perfect cover, for as long as it lasts. But soon a simple school outing turns dangerous, not just for Jacky but for many of her classmates as well.

Then, for much of the novel, Jacky and her fellow students use all the skills and the meager supplies they have to seek to escape from the terrible fate for which they are headed.

In the fourth book of the “Bloody Jack” series, Mayer skillfully continues his development of a memorable character. Jacky is older and wiser but still far too impetuous for her own good.

With a shocking ending, Mayer has set himself up well for the next chapter in Jacky’s adventures. Once again, it seems she’ll be seeing the world, only from yet another brig.

“THE BODY IN THE IVY,” by Katherine Hall Page, William Morrow, New York, 2006, hardcover, 246 pages, $23.95.

In this 16th installment of her Faith Fairchild mystery series, Page draws inspiration from her years at a women’s college in the late 1960s and from Agatha Christie’s classic “And Then There Were None” to whip up a tasty treat.

In “The Body in the Ivy,” caterer Faith gets one of the most plum assignments of her career: catering a college reunion on the remote island of best-selling romantic suspense author Barbara Bailey Bishop.

Once she arrives at Bishop’s Island, Faith quickly discovers that she and six of the women had been invited under more or less false pretenses by the author.

Bishop has a secret. She’s actually Elaine Prince, and she and the other six all graduated from the all-women’s Pelham College in the early ’70s, before going their separate ways. Her twin sister, belle-of-the-ball Helene, fell to her death from the campus’s Gothic tower just before graduation, in what was ruled an accident.

Elaine never bought that explanation, and she’s determined to get to the truth. So she has trapped her fellow alums, all of whom had motive to kill the manipulative Helene, in her compound, with no phones or transportation off the island.

As in the above-mentioned Christie classic, the women get killed off one by one, and ever-observant outsider Faith must figure out who the killer among them is: Elaine or one of the remaining others.

Agatha Award-winner Page does an admirable job of telling these women’s stories through four flashbacks, corresponding to each year of college. It soon becomes evident that Helene had it coming, but from whom stays in doubt until nearly the end.

Suffice it to say that “Ivy” will grow quickly on readers.