Review: by Bernadette Longu for Readers’ Favorite
In The Ledge Light: New London, Diana K. Perkins has written a wonderful romance around a famous landmark in New London – Long Island Sound. The time period is the 20th century when LGBTQ persons were not readily accepted or tolerated. Any family who had one would keep them under wraps or ship them off to some faraway place so nobody would be embarrassed. The main characters in this book are Martha Green, known as Marty, her brothers Tom and Charlie, her mother Mrs. Green, and Vita Little, a widow. Other characters that come to light in this wonderfully written book are Rodger or ‘Gunny’, Fanny, Virginia, The Ledge Light Lighthouse Staff Engineer Harold, and last but not least, Annie the librarian.
Diana K. Perkins takes the reader on Marty’s journey of discovery from her home town where she grew up on a farm to the Ledge Light lighthouse and all the adventures that she encountered along the way. The author has written in such a way that you find you need to keep reading to see how Marty absorbs the lessons learned, how she puts them to good use, what happens to the friends she makes, and how they react when they discover who she is. This book is a very compelling read. I found it was a big help with realizing how hard it must have been and still is for people to accept that we are all not the same and we don’t all follow the laws that man has laid down. Thank you for a most enjoyable, well-written, and outstanding read on a very sensitive subject at the best of times. A page-turner from start to finish!
The Ledge Light – What sends a farm girl to sea, to find her way masquerading as a man, to one of the lonely rocks of the Long Island Sound? A broken heart, a thirst for adventure? Follow Martha Green from a Franklin Farm to the Ledge Light in New London.
Excerpt:
For a person who doesn’t believe in a god or an afterlife or anything more than what I can see and touch, I find it oddly unnerving that there are places where I feel I’ve lived in another life, where when I ride down the road I think I’ve done this before in a carriage with horses, or I’m so comfortable in a neighborhood that I think I’ve been there before, long, long before. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I don’t think I was, as some people imagine themselves, a princess or a queen, a lady-in-waiting, king or nobleman; I was probably a charwoman, a serf, or a poor and struggling waif.
I would have been a logger or mountaineer or farmer or fisherman or lighthouse keeper… and that is what I became, a keeper of the light. For as much as I need people, my need for quiet and solitude is greater. Some people may feel a discomfort within themselves when they are alone and feel complete only when others are with them. My comfort within my own skin, my own skull, is complete in solitude. It is not just the hustle and bustle of cities or town centers that I dislike; it is the chatter of idle minds who are uncomfortable with silence and endeavor to fill any quiet moment with amiable conversation.
Available at the Windham Textile and History Museum, 411 Main St., Willimantic, CT
(c) copyright 2024 – by Diana K. Perkins