May Pick/ The Three Weissmanns of Westport

By Cathleen Schine

Divorce at any age is difficult to say the least, but when seventy-eight year-old Joseph Weissmann tells his seventy-five year-old wife Betty that he wants a divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences," she replies, Of course there's irreconcilable differences, what does that have to do with divorce?"

So opens the novel, "The Three Weissmanns of Westport," by Cathleen Schine. When Betty is left by her husband of forty-eight years because he has fallen in love with his assistant, she is shocked and confused. Betty's two grown daughters are also left confused and anxious, as they suddenly find themselves middle-aged products of a broken home. When Betty is forced to leave her luxurious Manhattan apartment she accepts her cousin's offer to use his beach cottage in Westport, overlooking Long Island Sound. Her daughters' lives also seem to be coming unraveled, as younger daughter Miranda's literary agency is caught up in scandal and and Betty has the idea that Miranda should come with her to get away from the public eye. Practical library director and elder daughter Annie, who thinks she may be having an affair with an author feels that she should also move with them. If only to keep an eye on her impulsive sister and capricious mother and on their dwindling purse strings.

In an homage to Jane Austen, Schine has adapted "Sense and Sensibilty" and moved it to Westport, Conneticut. As the sisters try to look after their "grieving" mother, she has told all that instead of divorcing her Joseph has died, they mingle with the suburbs version of aristocracy and love starts to blossom for both of them. Annie and Miranda find themselves struggling between the demands of reason and romance.

May Pick/ From Harvey River

By Lorna Goodison

"From Harvey River" is the story of the "fabulous Harvey girls" in particular the author's mother, Doris who seemed to live in two places at once on the tropical island of Jamaica. Kingston, where she raised her daughter Lorna and her eight siblings, and Harvey River in the parish of Hanover where she was born and spent her childhood.

To grow up in Harvey River, named after her English grandfather, meant a life of Victorian niceties in her parents home combined with the rich bounty of the land for Doris Harvey. Even with her strong-willed mother Margaret and her dreamer of a father David plus her somewhat overbearing sister Cleodine and the rest of her siblings and extended family life was sweet and simple. When Doris meets and marries her husband Marcus Goodison, their fortunes change. His garage business failing, they are forced to move to Kingston and face the harsh urban lifestyle, and Harvey River becomes a place that Doris frequently returns to in her dreams.

Lorna Goodison weaves together island lore with the story of her mother's life, from the eden of Harvey river to when "things changed" and they moved to Kingston. No matter how hard life became, however, the author remembers her mother's bottomless cooking pot, how she could sew clothes to fit any shape and the first word all her children learned to read was SINGER.