"The Country of Pointed Firs" by Sarah Orne Jewett

This book was not what I expected, but I am not sure what I expected. There's something wonderful about knowing very little about a book before you read it—as I was going through it, I was like, wait, is this an 1896 story about a middle-aged lady herbalist in a small village competing against the local doctor? Hold on, here's an octogenarian sea captain telling a story of Arctic shipwrecks and eerie polar cities? (Mental note: re-read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.) Then there is a beautiful summer day spent with the herbalist's mother and brother, and an afternoon sitting with a heartbreakingly sweet old fisherman, who sits in his neat-as-a-pin home all alone, knitting and remembering his dead wife. There's also the story of the herbalist's cousin by marriage who was crossed in love and decided to spend the rest of her life alone on an island, with her neighbors occasionally throwing parcels ashore of things they thought she might need. The unnamed narrator–a middle-aged woman writer–encounters these stories and experiences in the course of a summer spent in the costal village of Dunnet, Maine, and the book is like a writer's journal. For a night or two, I could almost believe I was somewhere near a blue sea, with trees silhouetted on the hill edges behind me.