The last is a skill polished in Thayer's years as a piper with the Maine St. Andrews' Pipes and Drums. There is a classical unity of time, place and people in this deceptively simple novel, which begins in a late-season ice storm and ends when the lilacs and flowering crab are just coming into bloom. The warmth that thaws the Maine landscape and prepares it for a new summer infuses also its people. MacQueen's wife and two children are dead, killed 20 years earlier in a fire while Peter was away from their Massachusetts home at a bagpiping competition. For two decades, he has lived as a recluse, immersed in loss and survivor's guilt.
Nothing seems likely to change.
Then, with the starkness of an apparition, a pregnant young woman arrives in his dooryard during the ice storm. A devout Jehovah's Witness, Elaine Sinclair faces difficulties in her marriage and her pregnancy that she must resolve. And she has chosen this cabin in which to resolve them. With strength, talent and a fine sense of dramatic pacing, Thayer draws this man and this woman into a series of incidents that lift them out of their private agonies toward the promise of better lives. You'll find your pulse racing and your breath coming quickly when Thayer plunges you into a life-threatening boating collision or chronicles the hours of a home birth.