Islands of Time: A Novel
By Barbara Kent Lawrence ’61
Just Write Books, 2013
When Rebecca Grangers falls in love with Ben Bunker, she is only 14. In 1958, a summer girl is not allowed to love a year-round boy, son of a fisherman in Downeast Maine, and yet she does. When her father dies, loss and anger overpower her, and she commits a sin, terrible at the time, that almost destroys her. She hides from her life in fantasies until she returns to Maine as an adult, and struggles to come to terms with the past. Islands of Time is a moving story of loss, pain, and growth, but also of unexpected forgiveness and love that celebrates the people and places of Downeast Maine.
In 1948, Barbara Kent Lawrence fell in love with Mount Desert Island as a summer kid, and in 1979 she became a “year-round summer person,” a status more compelling and complex than she could then have imagined. In 1998, she wrote her dissertation on the gap between the high rate of achievement Maine’s fourth-grade students evidenced on national tests, and the low rate at which they went to college. She has since written books about education and eating disorders in men, and she’s working on a manuscript about her British family during World War II. Though Lawrence no longer lives in Maine year-round, she spends as much time as possible on Mount Desert Island.