A chicken coop with a rooster crowing at dawn stands next to a garden with vegetables to cover acres. A house filled with functional antiques relaxes by a hand-pumped well. A farm for various functions seems like living nostalgia stretches across the landscape. Six ponies in a ring pace around the farm all day.
These are the images that set Suzanne Strempek Shea's novel \Around Again."" The unassuming ponies are the working animals that move the events of the book forward while remaining in their circle. They give a feeling of agelessness to a serene place defiled by a single mystery that eventually brings the narrator home.
The reader is dropped into the life of Robyn Panek, a 40-year-old teacher at a community college in some nameless town, who must now return to the farm. Robyn's relationship to the farm extends back to her first summer there at age 7, when she stayed with her Aunt Victory and Uncle Pal. She continued to spend her summers there for 11 more years, reveling contentedly in its redemptive regimen.
The pull that unravels Robyn's tightly-bound knot is a strange boarder by the name of Lucy Dragon. Lucy is taken in with an honest skepticism because of her renegade past. While Robyn maintains her doubts of Lucy, they become fast friends. This sends a few ripples through Robyn's romance with Frankie, a local delivery boy and farmer.
Lucy is no dangerous criminal, though she has visited a string of mental health institutions. She walks onto the farm enigmatically and leaves it scorned.
Now, 22 years later, Robyn returns to the farm. Her aunt has passed away and her uncle is incapacitated. She must reveal the mysteries of Lucy Dragon, reconcile her lost love for Frankie and see that the ponies find a proper pasture.
Shea's book is like an early morning on the farm. The sun does not quite come up in the first pages and you have to rub your eyes to get into it. That soon changes when the sun breaks over the horizon to reveal a richly textured land of fertile produce. The dew lifts as the mysteries of Lucy Dragon evaporate with the morning light. The characters are as solid as the earth they walk on, but do crack up like the soil in a drought.
""Around Again"" combines a fresh style with honest attention that gives the reader a satisfying read.
