He is 27 years old and has been working on boats since he was 12, and it never gets easier. Pale fingers like taper candles, her breasts small globes-entire worlds-under the cotton ticking of her bodice… For years this memory has lulled him to sleep on his hard narrow cot, distracted him from seasickness (which still plagues him, after all these years), tamped down the fear that swells in his chest on every trip. There is Birgid, with her wide blue eyes and straw-colored hair, lingering near the dock at the end of the day, waiting for him when the fishing vessels come in. What would he be doing now if he’d stayed in the small village of Gallinge, where he was born? Little imagination is required for this exercise, but it comforts him to picture it. It is tempting to turn over in his cocoon of blankets and burrow deeper. He blinks: even in the depths of the ship, he can see bright whiteness through the cracks. All the sounds of a ship in the ocean are absent: the slap of water against the hull, the creak of boards shifting and settling in the waves, the giant bird’s-wing flap of the sail. George River channel, the roiling sea hardens, quickly and almost imperceptibly, into a bumpy sheet of ice.Ī young Swedish sailor wakes to silence. Returning to the warm kitchen, they carry firewood from the attached shed and stack it beside the hearth, pull the doors shut tightly behind them, line windowsills and doorframes with blankets.įar below them, in the St. To be outside for more than a few minutes is to risk freezing to death. In the kitchen, a retired sea captain and his wife and daughter pull on wool socks and leather boots and hurry to feed the animals in the barn. Wind whips up the hill, strafing the white clapboard house at the top.

George River flows into the Atlantic Ocean, a storm sweeps in, sending the temperature plummeting. On Hathorn Point, above Kissing Cove, where the St.

What follows is the story of Olson’s ancestor, a discrete passage that Baker Kline ultimately left out of the novel, but stands on its own as heartfelt tale of American immigration.įebruary 1890.

Christina Baker Kline’s A Piece of the World is the story of Christina Olson, the unlikely anti-muse of painter Andrew Wyeth, and the cranky mutual respect they developed as neighbors in rural Maine.

New book by christina baker kline