title: Summers at Blue Lake: A Novel
author:  Jill Althouse-Wood 
description: Barbara Jean Ellington, BJ, is at a crossroads. Recently separated from her cheating husband, Bryce, BJ and five-year-old son Sam depart Michigan for her late grandmother Nonna's home in Pennsylvania. While sorting out her life, BJ comes across Nonna's private notebooks, and she uncovers family secretsincluding how Nonna and her lesbian partner, Grandma Lena, came to spend their lives together. As BJ learns more about her family history, she is haunted by memories of her childhood and her first true love (and Lena's nephew), Travis. Things begin to look up when he appears one day, recently divorced, on her lawn, but a late reappearance by Bryce could muck things up. This is Althouse-Wood's first novel, and though she begins with an interesting premise, the novel falls victim to prose leaden with preciousness (I spoke the name, Sam, holding the <i>m</i> in my mouth like the taste of a Life Saver I was trying to commit to memory) and banal plotting. <i>(Aug.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  # The Blue Man
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Mary Hartwell Catherwood
  
  
  This page formatted 2007 Blackmask Online.
  
  
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  Produced by David Widger
  
  
  
  
  
  THE BLUE MAN
  
  
  From “Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899
  
  
  By Mary Hartwell Catherwood
  
  
  The lake was like a meadow full of running streams. Far off indeed
  
  
  it seemed frozen with countless wind-paths traversing the ice, so level
  
  
  and motionless was the surface under a gray sky. But summer rioted in
  
  
  verdure over the cliffs to the very beaches. From the high greenery of
  
  
  the island could be heard the tink-tank of a bell where some cow sighed
  
  
  amid the delicious gloom.
  
  
  East of the Giant's Stairway in a cove are two round rocks with
  
  
  young cedars springing from them. It is easy to scramble to the flat
  
  
  top of the first one and sit in open ambush undetected by passers. The
  
  
  world's majority is unobservant. Children with their nurses, lovers,
  
  
  bicyclists who have left t