Today is a very good day. I found a tie to Tenants Harbor in the last part of the book, Icelander! (Roseledge Books is part of the village of Tenants Harbor, Maine.) This is very exciting because I am ever alert to ties with degrees of separation between a book and TH.
For example, mysteries by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child set in New York City have forensic work done at the Museum of Natural History, and the first Director of the MNH is Albert Bickmore who lived (or maybe visited relatives) two houses away from Roseledge Books in TH.
In Icelander, on p. 196 I read, “The high wooden walls of [Hrothgar’s Mead Hall] were hung with chalk drawings that depicted the logos of the various available beers. This month’s guest brew was St. George’s Winter Ale, and its logo showed the eponymous saint lounging beneath an apple tree while some sort of dew — presumably Winter Ale — dripped from the fruit and into his yawning mouth. In the background, a white-clad damsel was battling a dragon; she used a hairbrush instead of a sword.” And guess what? Tenants Harbor has an equally unusual St. George and the Dragon, sculpted from discarded metal by former welder, Dan Daniels, and standing very tall on the lawn of the Town Hall! (The village of Tenants Harbor is in the Town of St. George.)
Coincidence, you say? A harsh judgment. Clearly, the book provides, albeit unknowingly, a tie between two places, alike in their harboring unusual St. Georges. Okay, the tie is, well, tenuous, but it’s fun to think about the possibilities as I read the books and live summers in TH. And it usually moves the book’s “buy-rating” up a step, in this case, from “maybe” to “maybe+”. Tie to TH or no, Icelander is one strange book.