“How To Read A Book” sounds like it could be be a primer for young readers. Instead it’s a primer of a different kind – a roadmap, of sorts, for survival inside a fictional Maine women’s prison. This warm hug of a book embraces reading as a life-altering tool, a way of viewing the world beyond a prison’s walls. “When we gather to talk about books, we’re readers,” says Harriet, who runs the prison Book Club. “Not embezzlers. Not murderers. Readers.”

This latest novel by acclaimed Portland author Monica Wood was delayed a year, due to a labor strike at the book’s publisher, Harper Collins, which the author publicly supported. The book’s arrival now couldn’t be more timely, given our current moment of book bans, grievance and cancel culture. This book serves as an antidote to all of that – a celebration of decency, redemption and grace.

Local review

“How to Read a Book”
by Monica Wood
288 pages, hardcover. Mariner. $28

The story features three vivid main characters: Violet Powell, a 22-year-old ex-con, who killed a woman while driving drunk, and served time for manslaughter; Frank Daigle, the widower, whose wife was killed in the accident; and Harriet Larson, a retired teacher who volunteers at the local prison, serving as Book Lady, or Bookie, as the inmates call her.

The three meet by chance at the local bookstore, where Frank is the handyman and “store dad,” and Harriet, its best customer. Violet, newly released from prison, shows up at the store one day. Harriet quickly befriends the former Book Club member, becoming a motherly surrogate, while Frank, standing on a ladder, freezes in place. He’s caught off-guard by the sight of the very woman he sat behind in court, several years before.

“Violet was heartbroken, not broken; (Frank) could see that.” Wood writes. “She would not be broken, and he liked that about her, had known it from the moment he’d spotted her in the courtroom, something about the way she held herself, a steely blend of contrition and resolve. For days, he’d watched her; he’d been drawn to her, drawn to the mistake she’d made….He saw himself in that shipwrecked girl.”

The story moves back and forth in time – between the courtroom, where Violet’s dying mother showed up every day, facing the shame of a daughter on trial; and the university lab, where Violet now works with a bird scientist; between the prison and the bookstore; between a fatal decision and its aftermath.

This open-hearted book radiates kindness, just shy of excess. Wood manages to avert that result with a combination of irreverence, humor and grit. Her characters have attitude to spare, crucial to their their basic cred.

And, of course, the focus on books, in a prison, is as vital as air. When Violet protests that books won’t solve her troubles, Harriet counters that books offer perspective, giving problems room to breathe.

“In the year and a half since we’ve been coming to Book Club, the Book Lady has tried out all kinds of authors, from Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith, and we’ve complained about them all,” Violet says. “We love complaining. It’s weirdly empowering. The Book Lady hasn’t figured that out yet.”

Then, later: “I miss me in Book Club,” Violet says. “I miss how Harriet was forever showing us how to read. How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a ‘meanwhile’ – an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along. Three bears strolling in the forest: story. Goldilocks wrecking their house: meanwhile.”

This is a smart feel-good book, rich and complicated. Harriet urges the women in Book Club to see fictional characters as fellow creatures, not to play judge and jury. Frank, too, embodies that same sense of fellow-feeling. Thus a young woman’s deadly error and its consequences form the story. Meanwhile, love and forgiveness prevail.

Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays and book reviews. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle. She is the author of “Someday This Will Fit,” a collection of linked essays.