About the Book

Returning Home
After seventeen years at sea, Linda Greenlaw, who played a prominent part in Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, decides to return home to a tiny island seven miles off the Maine coast with a population of seventy year-round residents, thirty of whom are her relatives. She wants to reconnect with her family, she wants to stay closer to the shore, and she wants to have a family of her own.

Linda Greenlaw is a planful person. She thinks about what she is doing. She studies and learns her craft. She prepares. And make no mistake about it. She is phenomenally successful, as a fisherman, as a writer and as a person.

Yet the book The Lobster Chronicles captures the very essence of the impossibility of controlling the outcome when you play with Mother Nature. You won't catch lobsters if you're not ready to catch lobsters, if your boat is not seaworthy or your lines won't hold. And you won't catch lobsters if you don't go where the lobsters are.

So the question is, if she wants to start a family, why does she spend all her time on an island with "three single men, two of whom are gay, and the third one of which is [her] cousin"?

There are answers to this question in the book, but there are even more questions. She loves her island, and she loves her work, and she loves her family. But several kinds of hell invade her paradise - cantankerous town meetings, a very crazy lady, dry lobster beds, interloping outsiders, and Charter Boy.

(Charter Boy, sight unseen, goes through an entire unsuccessful relationship with her in her head in the few seconds between first hearing about him and his fancy, prissy, boat chartering profession, and her imagined end to an imagined bad date: "Screw you, Charter Boy.")

Greenlaw is such an appealing person as she reveals herself in her books, that one can't help but think that her dry season will end, as the one in The Lobster Chronicles does, with a wonderful "haul."

For more information contact Ellie Chesebrough, Library Director
E-mail: echesebr@cwmars.org      Phone: (508)347-2512
Address: 306 Main Street Sturbridge MA 01566-1242
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