"Every Last Cuckoo," by Kate Maloy (Algonquin, 2008, paperback 2009, 304 pages, $13.95)

Sarah Lucas is an inspiration. The protagonist of Kate Maloy's first novel, "Every Last Cuckoo," finds her life turned on its head at age 75, but instead of fading away as older women seem to do in fiction, Sarah grows, she learns, she teaches and she nurtures.

She cares for a cast of lost souls, and allows them to care for her.

A cuckoo is, after all, a bird that lays its eggs in the nest of other birds.

The characters of this novel are cuckoos – teens with neglectful parents; a battered wife and her baby hiding from an abuser; a woman who, with her young son, awaits the death of her husband after a house fire; an Israeli scholar who is on sabbatical from the war and violence he has experienced.

Through a variety of odd circumstances, they have landed in the central Vermont farmhouse of Sarah, herself in a dark place after the death of her husband, Charles, after 50-plus years of a happy marriage.

The cuckoos move into bedrooms and dens, they cook, clean and share meals, they help raise each other's children. They become friends, healing themselves and each other in the process.

"Vermont was full of people who lived on the edge, but Sarah had never been so aware of this, nor so close to it. Everyone in her own household lived near the edge of poverty, the edge of old age, or the edge of adulthood – dangerous in itself," Maloy writes.

Then, referring to Sarah's childhood home in the Northeast Kingdom during the Depression, "More and more often, she recalled her childhood and that other household filled with people balanced precariously between survival and disaster, sanity and despair. This time around, things were less desperate."

Like virtually every other character in this book, Lucas is a little bit broken by loss herself.

In flashbacks, Maloy introduces us to the early loss of an infant son that planted in Sarah a fear of loving and losing, and the growing worries of day-to-day life that hold her back. While Charles Lucas spends every free moment in Vermont's wilderness, his wife stays home, afraid of the threats that exist in the wild.

After having lived in Vermont for five years herself, outside Montpelier in Worcester, Maloy provides a realistic – not idealized – portrayal of the state.

"In many ways, it is the landscape that speaks to me the most of any place I've lived in," said Maloy, a New Jersey native who is now a resident of Oregon, in a radio interview. "The shape of the hills, the hardwoods in the forest, the wildlife, the seasons. It makes me very sad that I can't be there."

It is only after Charles' death that Sarah Lucas slowly overcomes her fears, grabbing his camera and heading off each day into the woods he loved and taking pictures of the ugly things in nature – animal scat, carcasses of dead creatures – that suddenly become beautiful and safe behind the lens.

"Recently Sarah had started venturing into the woods instead of staying on the roads. Everything looked different now, with the leaves unfurled, the undergrowth thick, the light filtered and green. Everything looked crowded together, enfolding Sarah wherever she walked," Maloy writes. "… Now and then she felt something similar in her mind – burgeoning new life filling her up."

And slowly the cuckoos begin moving in and the real healing begins.

Maloy creates a cast of characters who are likable and believably flawed. Readers who have raised children or developed strong friendships will find their real-life thoughts and experiences reflected in this book, and for older readers particularly, "Every Last Cuckoo" is compelling and ultimately uplifting.

Maloy has also written a book that is a tribute to the power of older women.

"Annie Proulx once said it was very useful to her to have become invisible" so she could eavesdrop and spy, Maloy said in a radio interview. "The fact is elderly women in particular do become invisible in our culture and inconsequential."

Older women are portrayed as having no history, as being "dropped in the world."

But, Maloy added, "We bring with us our entire past and all the lessons we have learned."

And those Maloy passes on in "Every Last Cuckoo."



Susan Allen is the editor of The Times Argus.