Get your bonnet and hop onto the carriage, because we are traveling back to the first decade of the 1900s in Francena Hallett's Heart by Robert W. Spencer.
If you enjoy historical fiction and love our state of Maine, this book will both entertain and enlighten you. My experience with other Maine historical fiction books is that they often lean too heavily on the history, devoting long passages of it as background. Spencer interweaves historical fact into his story. He manages to give the reader a realistic sense of place of Westbrook, Bridgton, and North Waterford in the early part of last century. Those details were quite fascinating to me, thinking about the transportation, separation of family, professions, and homes.
Francena Hallett's Heart, A Novel of Romances and Revenge, goes way beyond painting a picture of life in the early 1900s in Maine. Francena is a multi-faceted woman who faces challenges akin to the modern age: leaving her home to pursue a career in dress designing, being a steadfast friend to the hapless Lottie, and having to choose between two very different suitors. If you consider the original meaning of the literary term romance, you can also follow the theme of the remote wilderness being overtaken by the development of towns.
And let's not forget about the revenge piece. Without any spoilers, suffice it to say that the revenge plot line puts the reader into the Thomaston Prison alongside a calculating female prisoner who has some supernatural powers. It may be 1910, but her revenge is aimed at characters with modern-day concerns: one is an older, poverty-stricken gentleman that today we would see as homeless, the other is an aging entrepeneurial woman in a lesbian relationship.
This novel is the third and concluding volume to Robert W. Spencer's Lizzie Millett Series. I normally would not read the third part of a series without having read the first and second, but it did work for me. Spencer parcels the perfect amount of background information, skillyfully woven into conversations when characters meet again in this novel.
The characters in the book are very real, and I did find myself rooting for them. The realistic trials and tribulations of life in this time and place were exarcerbated by the supernatural powers imposed on the characters, adding another level of interest for the reader. The journey through this book was as bumpy as a carriage ride in 1910, but I was a satisfied traveler in the end.
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