Once Upon a Time on the Banks

Set in the backwood Main village, Mattagash, this is a book about Amy Joy Lawler, descendant of Protestant settlers, who decides to marry a man of French-Canadian descent, an outsider. Cathy Pelletier also wrote "The Funeral Makers".

It is April 1969, in Mattagash, Maine (the setting for Pelletier's first novel, The Funeral Makers ), and the residents of the small, inbred community are slowly emerging from their cabin fever after five months of snow. This irreverent and bawdy novel tracks the town's most boisterous citizens as they become aware of the social event of the year: the unlikely marriage of Amy Joy Lawler, descendant of Mattagash's Protestant founder, to Jean-Claude Cloutier, Catholic, with an unacceptable French Canadian background. The crafty residents of northern Maine approach the wedding with varying goals. To bankrupt (and randy) motel owner Albert Pinkham, it's a chance to fill his cash register. To the Ivy family, wealthy relatives from Portland, it occasions a family reunion and a time to cement strained relationships. To the huge and larcenous Gifford clan, it presents a chance to steal out-of-state hubcaps and filch wedding gifts. On the day of the wedding a volatile mixture of Maine's finest and most tacky families meets in church--with astonishing results. In spite of the novel's raucous tone, it is apparent that Pelletier views her feisty Mainers with deep affection.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Here we return to Mattagash, Maine, in a tale as lively as Pelletier's previous one about that hapless riverside hamlet ( The Funeral Makers , LJ 5/15/86). The Sixties have arrived and Amy Joy Lawler plans a controversial miniskirted wedding. Meanwhile, her upscale Portland relations, the Ivys, have troubles: their funeral home lacks clients, a Liz Taylor lookalike pursues the married son and heir, and to witness Amy Joy's nuptials they must stay at Albert Pinkham's motel, scene of past humiliations. Nearby, the Snopes-like Giffords feud over events at Penny's post-Christmas sale while hoping to enhance their stock of hubcaps at the wedding reception parking lot. When these folks get together, the resulting mix of zany comedy, pathos, and sense of place makes worthwhile reading.
- Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.