Mortar and Pestle, a romance

In the small town of Sloan, West Virginia in 1981, Kate Harrington, a quirky middle-aged woman married for thirty-two years to an alcoholic, sets out to change her life. The way isn't easy--she has to distance herself both from her pompous Bostonian husband, Donald David Leslie Harrington, Ph.D., and the polar societies in which he moves. Even the natural world she embraces is pitted against her, but she pushes ahead. The setting and characters are as commonplace now as they were then--the small rural town with its diner, bar, church, motel, weekly newspaper, shops that come and go, a local college struggling to exist--everything owned by the descendants of the town's founders and the more enterprising crooks. At Sloan-Smoot College, we meet George D. Sherman, autocratic President; Leslie's disgruntled colleagues, including the insecure Dean of Admissions, Roger Lang; and three unusually bright new students who dazzle them all. In the town itself, William Bucklew ("Buck") Smoot, bank president, is a force to be reckoned with along with his gay, mentally ill son Bucky, his long-suffering wife Julia, his mistress Lindell up in Sweet Creek, and his wife's spinster sister Eleanor Kemp, an artist who lives as a recluse in a mansion Buck would love to get his hands on. Against all of this and more, Kate wages war. Not even she can imagine what the effort will cost her. "Mortar and Pestle, a romance," is a disturbingly entertaining story that stays with us.

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