Betsy Connor Bowen’s novela, Spring Bear, a Maine Literary Award Winner, is a book you won’t want to put down once you start reading. So it’s good that the book is short. I read it in a couple hours one afternoon.
The story is intriguing, about a young high-school age girl, born and raised in the Maine woods, who gets pregnant and wrestles with the decision to keep the baby or give it up for adoption. Making her life even more difficult, her mother takes up with a very abusive man.
The girl finally decides to do something about that man, and her decision may surprise you.
Bowen lives and writes in central Maine, and you can learn more about her at www.betsyconnorbowen.com.
Along Thirty Mile River by Helen Caldwell Cushman
We are very lucky that when Helen Caldwell Cushman’s grandson, David Caldwell, shared her scrapbook with Betsy Connor Bowen, she quickly recognized it as a good book. Helen lived in my town of Mount Vernon, and died at the age of 81 in 1986.
Her stories are set along the Thirty Mile River watershed that Linda and I live beside, and they feature ghosts, with plenty of murder and mayhem. Today, some people believe her house is haunted. I’m glad that is not the house we purchased!