People Along the Sand by Rachel King: Yes, you should read it

People Along the Sand by Rachel King
(cover)

Last night, I finished the novel People Along the Sand by Rachel King. It’s a quiet, calm, and deep exploration of several people who live in the 1960s in a small, coastal town in Oregon. 

It’s difficult to say what the novel is about.

It’s not about The Vietnam War, though that is happening and there are those who turn away from the daily news of it, those who enlist whole-heartedly, and those who try to figure out what they’ll do if they’re drafted. Later, a childhood summer friend will be killed in the war and, as with any sudden and unexpected death, the parents of the living child are faced with how to share the bad news and watch their child grieve.

It’s not about the Beach Bill that ensures public access to the Oregon beaches, although several characters door-knock in support of it and others worry how it will affect their businesses or homes. An estranged father and adult son are tossed back together because of the issue but the rift between them is too vast to keep them together.  

It’s not about the changing role of lighthouses, their automation, and the many storm-wrecked deaths that have happened and will now be prevented. But a retired lighthouse keeper’s whole life has been his knowledge and experience, and even after the death of his wife and the estrangement of his son, he still has no idea how to puzzle his personal history with his professional history. But he keeps trying.

It’s not about the swelling of women’s rights and equality or equal pay for equal work, but several women own businesses in the town and are unique in that. Another woman who has worked full-time as an accountant for her husband’s hotel as part of the marriage begins to want a decision-making role in the hotel, too, and starts to wonder why she both isn’t allowed that and isn’t paid for what is clearly beyond the role of wife and partner. She is starting to shift in her awareness of self and while others want a clear articulation of what that means or how they should act in response to that, she herself is in the midst of it and is trying to articulate and understand it herself.

It’s not about living beside the tumultuous ocean and under so many gray skies, but everyone gravitates to the ocean and everyone knows each other through the ocean—whether they grew up in the town or married into it. Each of them walk the beaches, know the hiding places of starfish, understand the precision and patience required to find agates, and are bound to each other in the shared but individual experience of coastal life. 

It’s not about baking or running a bakery but there is a character who runs her own bakery and does all the baking, ordering, and serving. She thrives in each aspect and enjoys the quiet, dark mornings and the care and focus of kneading, creating. And while she lives a life of solitude, it is her steadiness that others seek out.

The novel is exactly about what great novels are about: the shifting, beautiful lives of people and how our lives press against each other in unexpected, pivotal, quiet, or hardly detectable ways. It is about the pull of grief and the changing lives of mothers and children. It’s about leaving signs that you have lived and the dust left on aspects of the lived parts of our lives. The novel understands nostalgia and reality, broken legs and confused husbands. It understands the confusion of youth and the intimacy of two people talking about music. 

It’s a very good book. 

You should probably read it.

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• Purchase People Along the Sand anywhere books are sold. One place that's good is Book Shop: https://bookshop.org/books/people-along-the-sand/9781950843480 (And no, this is not an affiliate link and I receive absolutely no revenue for suggesting you buy a good book.)

2018 Summer Library Series: Library Time by Rachel King

Welcome back to the 2018 Summer Library Series in which writers remember their childhood libraries. This week's writer hails from Portland and shares the kind of magic that only you, dear reader, would know of. Please enjoy this week's reflection.

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Hillsdale Branch Library,
an earlier version of itself

Library Time

by 
Rachel King

I grew up near the Hillsdale branch of the Multnomah County Library system in Portland, Oregon. Based on the fact that my parents were readers, and that Multnomah County Library items are checked out at four times the rate of the national average, it’s not surprising that I received a library card as soon as I could write my name.

I remember the tire swing in the park across the street from the library where my siblings and I pushed each other until we felt like vomiting; the kind and reserved children’s librarian who for some reason let us show our rabbits as an extension of the summer reading program; the day at age eight that I walked toward the children’s section on the back wall of the library, saw a book on the second-to-bottom shelf, and my life changed. The book was Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor.

I don’t remember where I read it: maybe in a clearing between bushes at the back of the library park, maybe in the magnolia tree in my parents’ side yard, maybe on my bed on the top bunk, probably in the blue recliner in the living room where I tuned out family noise to focus on the written word.

Rachel King reading as a younger version of herself

I do remember I cried while reading the final paragraphs. As Cassie says, “I cried for things which had happened in the night and would not pass. I cried for T.J. For T.J. and the land.” It was the first book over which I cried, and I don’t cry over much. If a book could get me to see these characters and this place so clearly, then books were magic. And I’ve never stopped thinking that.

After childhood came the Knight Library at the University of Oregon, where I practiced conjugating Russian verbs on a study room blackboard; the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where I checked out dozens of books at a time, which I read in between working various jobs and trying, for the first time, to write seriously; the Wise Library at West Virginia University, where I found amazing poets while shelving books in an empty, elegant Robinson Reading Room at midnight or one a.m.; the Louisville Public Library, where I used the free internet once a week to talk to my friend on Skype; my current local library, the Midland branch, where I go to check out New York Review of Books Classics and browse Russian books and DVDs; the Oregon City Public Library—my mom’s childhood library—where now, as an on-call library assistant, I help patrons.

When I moved back to Portland, I went to the Hillsdale library. The old library building had been demolished, and replaced with a larger one on the same site. But inside was the same children’s librarian from my childhood, and to me, she looked no differently. And most importantly, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry was still on the shelf, for another generation to discover.

Hillsdale Branch Library as its newer self

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Rachel King,
photo used with permission

Today's library writer:

Rachel King is a writer and editor who lives in her hometown, Portland, Oregon. Her stories have most recently appeared in One Story and Flyway; her poetry chapbook Between Work and Light is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Learn more about her work at www.booksrachelking.com

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Continue enjoying reflections from the Summer Library Series: http://www.erinpringle.com/p/summer-library-series.html