Still Water Bending - by Wendy Mitman Clarke (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>Chesapeake Bay waterman Jines Arley Evans is a dying breed. And he's estranged from his daughter, Lilly Rae, who left Ophelia and planned never to return - until her father has a stroke. Lily must come home to her prickly relationship with her father, but slowly falls in love with her home, and with the man who was her best friend in childhood.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>In the river-born community of Ophelia, Virginia, on Chesapeake Bay, there are three religions: The Water, The Family, and The Land. For generations, this trinity has sustained a community of proud, independent people. But their way of life is dying. The fisheries are depleted. Third-generation waterman Jines Arley Evans clings to what little is left. His wife and son are long dead, his estranged daughter, Lily Rae, bitter at her father's emotional abandonment, far away. The family land and silent house, the workboat <em>Jenny Rae</em>, and the water, its rhythms, mysteries, and seasons are all that remain.</p><p>But when a stroke threatens to take even those remaining fragments of her father's world, Lily Rae must leave her life as a journalist in Portland, Maine and return home to care for Jines.</p><p>Thrown uncomfortably together, they must come to terms with each other and with their isolation from others. Maybe they can find common ground in an unlikely place, Jines's boat shed, where they once again try to build a traditional deadrise skiff together.</p><p>As Jines's powerful life contracts, Lily's expands. She begins to see the place and people she had left behind through new eyes, including Jamie Cockrell, her once best friend. Now divorced with a beautiful young daughter, Jamie yearns for what few other young men of Ophelia still want--a chance, like Jines, to run his own boat and work on the water. Lily is falling in love, not only with Jamie and his daughter but with her home. Yet in the end, she has to make the hardest decision she has ever faced.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p><strong><em>Still Water Bending</em></strong> is a deeply moving story about a woman's journey from a childhood, which resulted in a hardened heart, to experiencing that heart finally broken open. She finds that Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again" is not necessarily accurate - though the pain of such a journey is real and powerful. To take it requires true courage, and that courage is explored in this novel. It is a novel filled with tenderness, truth-telling and wisdom. It is a powerful, life affirming, "must read." <strong>Michael Glaser, Maryland Poet Laureate 2004-2009</strong></p><p><em><strong>Still Water Bending, </strong> </em>Wendy Mitman Clarke's evocative, moving novel, explores a Chesapeake and a waterman's family in the midst of great change. Jines Arley Evans and his adult daughter Lily Rae struggle to reconnect while navigating eddies of memory, tradition, and old hurts against a gorgeously detailed Chesapeake Bay. It's both an honest, nuanced family portrait and a ravishing love letter to the Chesapeake's working maritime communities--a worthy addition to the Chesapeake canon alongside writers like Horton, Tilghman, and Voight. <strong>Kate Livie, Author, <em>Chesapeake Oysters: The Bay's Foundation and Future, </em> former Director of Education, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum</strong></p><p>Both well-wrought and true... I loved every bit of it! <strong><em>Still Water Bending</em><em> </em></strong>takes you deep into the heart of the Chesapeake, into the lives of the watermen and their families and their powerful attachments to the land, the sea, and each other. Beautifully written and emotionally rich, this is a novel to read and read again. <strong>Barbara Esstman <em>The Other Anna, Night Ride Home, </em>and <em>A More Perfect Union</em></strong></p><p>Aye, God, Wendy Mitman Clark knows boats and the Bay, its rhythms, its accents, its soul. She is a beautiful writer and this is a beautiful book, with compelling characters and a deep sense of place that is as enchanting and enduring as a Chesapeake sunrise. <strong>Eugene L. Meyer</strong>, <strong>journalist and author of <em>Chesapeake Country<em> is a member of the board of the Washington Independent Review of Books, and a former Washington Post reporter and editor. </em></em></strong></p><p><strong>Still Water Bending</strong> portrays a vanishing way of life as the watermen...struggle to maintain their independence and their dignity against an influx of moneyed 'come heres' who do not understand or respect the water or the land. It is also the story of two proud and<br /> stubborn people, father and daughter, who...are struggling to come to terms with belonging and isolation, with loss and forgiveness, with dependence and choice, and with defiance and acceptance. They are trying to exert some control in a world where change comes whether we are ready for it or not. Written in the lyrical language of Bay fishing and boatbuilding, <strong>Still Water Bending</strong> explores with authenticity and sensitivity how people and communities adapt to the turbulence of life flowing around them. <strong>Beth Leonard VP at Boat US, author of <em>Blue Horizons: Dispatches from Distant</em><em> Seas, The Voyager's Handbook</em>, and <em>Following Seas: Sailing the Globe, </em><em> Sounding a Life</em></strong></p><br>
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