Bill Marshall's Reviews > Leaving Rock Harbor

 Huge bias alert: I knew the author when I was fourteen years old and she was twelve. I'm not usually good at reading books by people I know because knowing them interferes with how the prose sounds in my head as I read it. In this case, though, considering that I knew her forty-five years ago, that's no longer true. I'd read her other two books and I was more impressed by the fact that someone I knew actually wrote a book than by the books themselves.
 That's not the case with Leaving Rock Harbor. It stands on its own for me and earned an Editor's Pick in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. If you have any interest in what New England, labor movements and people were from 1916 to 1934, this book is for you. When I knew the author she was more interested in the visual arts than writing. I mention this because her descriptions of places are so vivid that her talent for drawing transferred well to words. Other senses are evoked too. The smell of the sea and the mix of tobacco and aftershave on a man's neck, the taste of lobster dipped in butter and lemon, the feel of cold wood on a bare foot.
 Though published in 2010, the subplot about the demise of New England's cotton mills and what came next is a prescient one.