When We Were the Kennedy's by Monica Wood

In there after Christmas sale Amazon featured this book for a minimal price for the Kindle version. After not a little debate noting the author being from Maine I made the purchase and have to agree that this is a pleasant little story.

Subtitled " A Memoir of Mexico Maine " Wood tells us the story of her childhood and how it all changed around the dividing line of 1963. History tells us that 1963 was a dividing line for almost all Americans but while America was riven by the death of their President Wood's childhood, she was nine in 1963, is torn open in the spring of that year when her father drops dead on his way to work.

We never really get to know Wood's father except in her reminisces and after the fact learned memories of her father's smiling good nature, about his happiness with his lot in life and his love of his former home of Prince Edward Island. Getting up and going to work each day lunch-pail in hand he is a model of a memory that many people my age can certainly relate too. My father too was a simple man with a large family that never complained. He was the salt of the earth, not perfect, but a man with responsibilities he welcomed and honored. This is what we feel about the author's father.

Still to be a widow in 1963 with three young daughters, one of them disabled enough that she will never get past the second grade is no easy thing and young Monica's mother is devastated. Over the course of the next year Monica's mother will struggle, slowly gaining strength and finding a special kind of solace with the kinship she feels with the President's widow just six months earlier.

Longing for father figures her Uncle, her Mother's younger brother provides one until he is stricken with a alcohol induced nervous breakdown. Stronger in that stressful time for her is the father of her best friend. Mr. Vaillencourt worked at the mill with her father and when he takes his daughters and includes Monica in the line " vanilla's for my three girls" she feels both what she has been missing and did not know she needed. The author mentions how nice this whole family was to her but realizes from today that she, as a small fatherless girl simply broke her friend's fathers heart.

Mexico, Maine is dominated by The Oxford. A paper mill that in the early sixties was producing magazine print that dominated the market. It was a time where both labor and the management felt good about what they had. It would soon end. My sister's husband grew up in a neighbor town, his father and family members worked at that same mill. It is an experience many in Maine and many across towns in this country can understand how a mill or a business that dominates a town can feel like the living breathing heart of a town.

Little did young Monica know that this was the high point in her town. As the mill over the next fifty years went through owner after owner, downsizing all the while the towns along the Androscoggin shrunk with every census. It is the story of Maine, and of all the manufacturing cities of the Northeast and Middle West.

The book is good, it is not however great. Certainly for me, growing up in the same general area it is more relatable but I think it could hit a note of recognition for a large group of people.

Wood's writing is a bit clunky at times, it is not revealed as much in a memoir like this and indeed some of her phrase turning is like listening to my own uncles and aunts from my youth. That is the joy of the book. Still I suspect that her actual fiction which is definitely more along the lines of female authors we all know would not be in my interest group.

Still even as a time and place document only this book, outside of the story, has real value. Worth the read but your own life experience might determine how much you enjoy this book.