Road to Dalton (Spoilers)

I’ve been on a reading streak lately, finishing books in a day. One book I recently read is the Road to Dalton, by Shannon Bowring. It’s about a small town in Maine in the early 1990s and the people who live there like Trudy Haskell, the no nonsense librarian who is married to the town doctor but is really in love with her best friend Bev (homosexuality was much less accepted then). There’s Rose who is married to Tommy who lays hands on her versus Nate who is madly in love with Bridget, who has just given birth.

I felt that this book was an exercise in psychology. From the very beginning, you can spot some problems: dead marriages, illicit love, domestic violence. But the main thing I got from this book was how insidious postpartum depression is. Spoiler alert: Bridget commits suicide halfway through the book. Bridget is married to Nate who works long hours on the police force leaving Bridget alone all day with a colicky baby. At first it looks like Bridget will drown the baby in the tub. But at the last minute she places Sophie in her bed, gets into the bath herself and slits her wrists. It was a very intense moment in an excellent book. The grief of Nate is palpable.

In the book, everyone seems to blame themselves for not seeing Bridget’s distress sooner. But according to  https://www.postpartumdepression.org/resources/statistics/, nearly 50% of mothers with postpartum depression end up not diagnosed by a healthcare professional. The book also deals with the issue of sexuality. Several characters are bisexual which is almost taboo at the time. If you want a book with well developed characters, a plot you can follow and a place you can envision, follow the Road to Dalton.