Weekly Reader: Maggie Elizabeth Harrington by D.J. Swykert; Historical Romance Explores Youthful Love For Humans and Animals
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: It's an odd experience reading a series out of order. Besides the confusion of events not being chronological, there is a sense of sadness when you know how things are going to end. Every hopeful moment and every happy ending is tinged with some sadness that this happiness is only temporary.
That's the experience that I have when reading Maggie Elizabeth Harrington trilogy by D.J. Swykert. Through no fault of mine or Swykert’s, I read the last book, For the Love of Wolves first, followed by the first book Maggie Elizabeth Harrington, then the second, Alpha Wolves. Because of this, it is emotionally difficult to read about the young girl Maggie was without thinking of the elderly lonely woman that she becomes.
This book begins when Maggie is 13 and she witnesses her dour father kill a fragile kitten. Sickened by the event and upset by her widowed father's stern nature, Maggie finds solace with her friends, Annie and Tommie Stetter and in their explorations of the nature around their small town of Central Mine, Michigan.
The trio learns that a hunter shot a female wolf who had puppies. Maggie, Tommie, and Annie sneak out the four orphaned puppies and raise them in secret.
As they care for the wolf puppies, the imaginative Maggie can't resist galling in love with Tommie. She starts dreaming of a life in which her male friend becomes her lover and future husband.
Like For the Love of Wolves, Maggie Elizabeth Harrington is filled with beautiful evocative descriptions of nature and a strong connection between humans and animals.
The descriptions contrast greatly with For the Love of Wolves’s. Whereas For the Love of Wolves was concerned with winter and aging, Maggie Elizabeth Harrington deals with spring and summer and youth.
When Maggie looks out her bedroom window, she is glad to feel the sun in her face. In the winter her father boards up the house to keep the heat inside, so Maggie dislikes the darkness both real and manufactured.
In the summer however, Maggie can see for miles. She says, “I can see the bluffs that overlook Lake Superior, which surround this narrow peninsula I live on here in Northern Michigan. It is beautiful, so beautiful that when it is summer like it is now, I don't think that I would ever want to live anywhere else.”
Also like it's predecessor, or technically successor, Maggie Elizabeth Harrington is filled with the emotional connection between humans and animals. The wolf puppies are brilliantly written as Tommie, Maggie, and Annie care for and name them: Annabelle, Naomi, Emma, and Blackie. Maggie feels a maternal bond with them. It is no coincidence that as she and Tommie care for the wolves, they start to think that a life together is possible. Their caring for the puppies transfers into a caring for each other and opens the possibility of greater love.
Maggie's love for these small animals also foreshadow her affection for wolves later in life and makes her behavior in For the Love of Wolves understandable. Her desire to protect her beloved wolves lasts throughout her life and it is perfectly natural that she would seek vengeance against those who would hurt them.
The widowed lonely Maggie from For the Love of Wolves is far off in the future. This is a youthful Maggie in the summer of her life. This book is filled with the promises of youth in the summer. Young puppies are born. Young people fall in love. The type of youth where people act irrationally, dreams are created, and promises are made without thinking of the reality that is involved in preparing for those dreams, keeping those promises, and thinking about the consequences of those actions.
That recklessness is personified after Maggie, Tommie, and the puppies are discovered. (The more practical Annie has already ducked out worrying about the consequences of getting caught and no longer interested in living in Maggie's fantasy world.)
After they have to face Maggie's father and the hunter in a violent confrontation, Maggie and Tommie run off.
Left to their own devices, the couple stay with a friend and dream of a life together on the run. Unfortunately, their plans are not well thought out and are based on impulse than any acceptance of reality. Unfortunately, reality comes crashing into their dream world. The outlaws return home and there are real consequences for their actions.
The beautiful life that Maggie in which has dreamt is gone. Youth must give way to maturity. The summer lovers must become the autumn leaders and winter elders. Those days disappear for them as they do everyone.
What doesn't disappear however is the love that Maggie has for animals. As shown in a final passage between Maggie and a newly born tiny kitten, Maggie reveals that for the rest of her life, the animals have at least one human protector. No matter how old Maggie gets or her life changes, she will always be constant in her love for animals.
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