A New Series: One Minute Reviews of
Books by Vermont Authors
Laura's column "One Minute Reviews" has appeared bi-weekly in Wilmington, Vermont's Deerfield Valley News since 2015. In April 2018, she found that no Vermont periodical consistently reviews all commercially published fiction and non-fiction by Vermont authors, so she started a series to fill that void. Published reviews from that series and some earlier reviews of local authors are listed with links to a scan of the printed copy. Reviews still in queue are listed without links until they appear in print.
The books reviewed in this series are available through Wilmington's Pettee Memorial Library, the Whitingham Free Public Library, and locally owned Bartleby's Books in Wilmington.
No Urn Burial
Edith Forbes, The Lawnmower Lady: a Novel. Rootstock Publications, 2026
The Lawnmower Lady in Edith Forbes’s title is Fay Kirkwood, the 79-year-old owner of a Vermont pig farm that includes the small-engine repair shop she runs with her niece, Dryden. Fay dies in the book’s opening paragraphs, but her spirit lingers on earth, merging randomly (or perhaps not) with the consciousness of the people her life has touched. The result is a literary tour de force: a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued omniscient narrator frustrated by her inability to deal with the chaos that follows her death.
Behind that chaos is Fay’s opinion, expressed to Dryden after every local funeral, that caskets and embalmment make corpses into toxic waste. When she dies, she should simply be carted out into the woods to feed the coyotes, foxes and other critters. And so, when Dryden finds Fay dead of a massive stroke in the barn, she immediately and single-handedly carries out Fay’s wishes. It’s a difficult and heavy job whose deep love and reverence Fay-the-narrator observes with gratitude mingled with concern. For Dryden, never one to care about others’ assumptions, unthinkingly decides that obtaining a “piece of paper” that acknowledges the time and cause of death can wait until later. Instead, she pours out her sorrow on her saxophone, immersed in variations that continue far into the night.
Gradually, the news of Fay’s death leaves the circle of her grieving friends and seeps into her small Vermont town—and so does the story of her unusual “burial.” The result is a gradually developing uproar. Fay, now “useless for all eternity,” watches helplessly as a local pastor turns her wish to be coyote food into a sacrilegious sin, and beauty parlor gossip wonders if Dryden might have murdered her aunt for her money. The situation is further complicated by the arrival of Fay and Dryden’s upscale family, just as the story of Fay’s unorthodox wishes slip out of the local paper and get picked up by national news. Anita Kirkwood, Fay’s sister-in-law and Dryden’s adoptive mother, is outraged to discover that the publicity of Fay’s “pagan burial” threatens to upend the Arizona congressional campaign of her son Spenser. She insists, loudly and repeatedly, that Fay must have a Christian burial. Dryden adamantly refuses to say where Fay’s remains are. Anita (tersely described by the town’s journalist as a “woman [who] would turn a Doberman into a doormat”) first forces the police to organize a hunt for the body, and subsequently makes accusations of murder that send Dryden to jail. Dryden’s supporters (and outsiders who have never met her) organize protests in favor of religious freedom and/or the First Amendment. The situation requires explanations and control, but Fay is helpless to supply either.
The story, all governed by Fay’s sardonic voice, is alternately satiric, romantic, ecological, and funny. (When the local journalist asks Dryden if she is named for the poet, she replies, “My brothers’ names are Spenser and Sidney. My dad was halfway to a Ph.D in literature when he got married and went to work in business. Our names are like the flowers you plant where you buried your cat.”) Fay’s down-to-earth observations provoke the reader’s laughter at the follies of mankind, especially of people who think they are more important than they are, and of people who under-rate their effect on potential lovers. Behind her practical voice is an intelligent and well-read novelist who, with a practiced hand, reflects upon mortality, reverence, tolerance, and love in a really good book.