Little Great Island by Kate Woodworth: Excerpt

We’re delighted to feature this excerpt from Kate Woodworth’s LITTLE GREAT ISLAND!

LITTLE GREAT ISLAND

On Little Great Island, climate change is disrupting both life and love

After offending the powerful pastor of a cult, Mari McGavin has to flee with her six-year-old son. With no money and no place else to go, she returns to the tiny Maine island where she grew up—a place she swore she’d never see again. There Mari runs into her lifelong friend Harry Richardson, one of the island’s summer residents, now back himself to sell his family’s summer home. Mari and Harry’s lives intertwine once again, setting off a chain of events as unexpected and life altering as the shifts in climate affecting the whole ecosystem of the island…from generations of fishing families to the lobsters and the butterflies.

Little Great Island Illustrates in microcosm the greatest changes of our time and the unyielding power of love.

EXCERPT

It’s Not a Lie if It Could Be True

Mari

At the clang of the car ramp onto the deck, Mari McGavin lifts her cheek from where it rests against the scratched and salt-pitted window in the ferry’s passenger cabin and regards the ratty-haired head of her six-year-old son, who lies asleep in the protective circle of her arm. The fact of him is the closest thing to a miracle that she knows. Who but God could have brought such perfection from inside her? Who but God would have reached through her clouded thinking and inspired her to grab Levi and run? Who but God could have made it possible to avoid whichever of her ministry brothers was sent after her—because surely someone had quickly noticed her and Levi’s absence—and then for the two of them to have travelled this far with virtually no money?

Mari presses her eyes shut. No, none of this can be attributed to God. God was once a background noise and an annoyance. Then a possibility of solace. And now? A false comfort that much be denied. A habit that must be broken. Or maybe a source of strength. Where does God end and her own will begin? Should that juncture be different? How to distinguish between her own wants and God’s? And what about Levi? Shouldn’t his needs be paramount? Does duty to God supersede the responsibilities of motherhood? Can she blame God for whatever happened to her son? No. The responsibility—the failure—is hers alone. 

“Damn it,” spits the untamable voice in her brain, the one that’s always gotten her in trouble. 

Opening her eyes, Mari takes in the wood-slatted passenger seats, the life buoy hooked to the wall. All those reminders of who she was before she left the island: ready and willing to live life to the max, was her own opinion. Constitutionally wired to cause trouble was her mother’s. “Vain and willful,” her husband, Caleb, and the ministry leader, Pastor Aaron, told her repeatedly in her last months at God’s Bounty. Disobedient. Possessed by the devil. Pastor Aaron, who looked like a benevolent grandpa and turned out to be a viper.

Whatever. That’s all in the past. She’s made it back to Little Great Island with Levi. Now she needs to reassure him, get him settled into her parents’ house. They both need food, a shower, and sleep. She’ll need to find a way to earn money. A lawyer must be hired. Her marriage must be ended.

Leaning forward, Mari shelters her son with her body. They’ve come a long way, but that was only miles. The distance they have ahead—the trip from her past to some kind of future—cannot be calculated in square feet or kilometers or even in light years. Nevertheless, it must be done. 

She lays her lips against Levi’s travel-stale forehead and whispers, “Levi, wake up.” 

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Kate Woodworth is the award-winning author of the novel Racing into the Dark, which Publishers Weekly said, “hits the mark repeatedly with emotional truths and fluid prose” and which Kirkus Reviews called, “vivid and honest, dramatic and without pat resolutions: an impressive debut”.

A passionate lover of the natural world, Kate is the author of essays on the impact of climate change on fishing and farming that have been published by the Climate Fiction Writers League and on her Substack, “Food in the Time of Climate Change.” Her novel about love, community, and climate change, Little Great Island, has been called “an extraordinary achievement and a pure pleasure to read” by National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award winner Ha Jin. Kate is the founder and creative force behind “Be the Butterfly”, a grassroots climate action initiative that invites everyone to do one small thing to help mitigate climate change. Kate received her MFA from Boston University.

Kate’s nonfiction writing on climate change can be found here:
Kate’s Substack
Climate Fiction Writers League

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing