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    The Marsh Queen
    The Marsh Queen
    The Marsh Queen
    Ebook431 pages7 hours

    The Marsh Queen

    By Virginia Hartman

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this “marvelous debut” (Alice McDermott, National Book Award–winning author of The Ninth Hour) follows a Washington, DC, artist as she faces her past and the secrets held in the waters of Florida’s lush swamps and wetlands.

    Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be.

    Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget—a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning. When Loni comes across a single, cryptic note from a stranger—“There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd’s death”—she begins a dangerous quest to discover the truth, all the while struggling to reconnect with her mother and reconcile with her brother and his wife. To make matters worse, she meets a man whose attractive simple charm threatens to pull her back towards everything she’s worked to escape.

    Torn between worlds—her professional accomplishments in Washington, and the small town of her childhood—Loni must decide whether to delve beneath the surface into murky half-truths and avenge the past or bury it, once and for all. “Fans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing read” (Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGallery Books
    Release dateSep 6, 2022
    ISBN9781982171629
    Author

    Virginia Hartman

    Virginia Hartman has an MFA in creative writing from American University and is on the faculty at George Washington University. Her stories have been shortlisted for the New Letters Awards and the Dana Awards. The Marsh Queen is her first novel. Find out more at VirginiaHartman.com. 

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    3.5/5

    17 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I loved this book! It has all the elements of life,love, Intrigue, violence and a happy ending....
    • 4/5
      Loni Mae Murrow, 36, has worked for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History as a bird artist for nine years.Her world is shaken when she gets a call from her 12-years-younger brother Phil in Tenetkee, Florida - her former hometown. Phil tells Loni that their mom Ruth has taken a fall, and has also been having memory issues. Phil and his wife Tammy have relocated Ruth to St. Agnes Home for physical and occupational therapy, and possibly a permanent move. Phil and Tammy need Loni’s help to go through Ruth’s things so they can rent out the house to help pay for her treatment.Loni is able to get family leave that allows her to take off for up to eight weeks. The leave is granted without pay, but Loni is able to get piece work as a liaison at the nearby the Tallahassee Science Museum while she is in Florida. As it happens, Loni’s BFF from childhood, Estelle, is a curator there, and can indeed send some work Loni’s way.While Loni is going through Ruth’s things, she finds a note from a woman named “Henrietta” who wrote: “Dear Ruth, There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd’s death.”Boyd is Loni’s father who died at the age of 37 in an improbable accident out on the swamp in his boat. He worked at Fish & Game, and knew the swamp like the back of his hand. Loni has always believed the rumor that her dad committed suicide, because he wouldn’t have had an “accident” - and she wants to protect Phil from finding out.Phil hardly knew his dad, and Loni never would broach the subject. For her, “talking about my dad is like touching an abscess. Fresh pain, long after the wound should have scabbed and mended.” But now they must, since Phil is trying to get the state to put up some money for Ruth’s care based on Boyd’s death while on the job. Loni knows that if Boyd committed suicide, there would be no compensation money.Loni starts asking questions around town, and before long she is getting anonymous death threats.Loni also begins taking a canoe out frequently to help her sketch some of the birds Estelle has requested pictures of. She fights an attraction to Adlai Brinkert, who runs the rental place, but doesn’t know whom she can trust.Frank Chappelle, her dad’s former boss, finally tells Loni that her dad was involved in doing drug deals. Loni doesn’t think that can be right, and in any event, with the danger to her in the town, there is clearly still something that someone doesn’t want Loni to know.Evaluation: The pace of this story is quite slow. While it may seem as if Boyd’s fate and the threats to Loni should take center stage, there is really much more time devoted to the flora and fauna of the swamp, the changing colors, and beauty of, the birds there, and the frustrations of trying to capture their essence by drawings on a page.

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    The Marsh Queen - Virginia Hartman

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