New England writer Joseph Monninger has an affection for Maine that runs deep. You can see it, hear it and feel its magnetic pull in the characters and settings of his new romantic novel, called simply “Margaret from Maine.”

Behind that plain title, however, awaits a complex story of love, loss and loyalty that explores romance in today’s era of far-off wars, unknown dangers, cruel injuries and painful choices that often prove to be no choices at all.

In a letter to editors that accompanies press copies of the book, Monninger makes a key point about the story he has set out to tell. “No villains live in this book, but the choices the characters must make are difficult ones.” They unfold, he tells us, in “a story of honor and of love.”

That is one story to promise. It is another to achieve. And it’s to Monninger’s considerable credit that he delivers on it so well.

Margaret, 31, is a girl grown into womanhood on a Maine dairy farm, She’s been married for several years to a Maine Guardsman, Sgt. Thomas Kennedy, who, after their initial year of marriage, was deployed to Afghanistan.

The facts add up bleakly. The family has become a military family to meet its financial needs. One price of that commitment is separation — a husband at war, a wife and baby son back in Maine, preserving hope for the future as they wait for Kennedy to come home. And he will come home, though not in any way that Margaret had conceived or expected.

On the book’s opening page, Kennedy, in an act of heroism, is severely wounded and left in a vegetative state, a terminal coma. He is alive, but he is unaware of his life and those who inhabit it. For a young woman with a baby son and the dairy farm he will inherit, the situation is complex and the burden heavy.

But Margaret is coping.

Monninger moves into the story with speed and commitment as he introduces Charlie King, another wounded soldier. King is a military emissary sent to escort Margaret to Washington, D.C., where, at President Obama’s invitation, she will appear at a ceremony honoring legislative passage of additional funds for veterans in vegetative states.

The two hit it off well. So well, in fact, that no-trespassing lines blur and basic human attraction pulls them together. Yet both retain a considerable sense of honor and loyalty to Margaret’s comatose husband and to themselves.

Eventually, the attraction between the two becomes overwhelming and, in the glamour of Washington entertainment and events, they are drawn together.

How their conflicting urges will resolve is the story of “Margaret from Maine.” And it is treated as a mature and meaningful love story. No two-for-a-nickel romance here — we are in the company of thinking people with goals beyond merely pleasing themselves.

In giving readers such a fully rounded look at people for whom love is a responsibility as well as a romance, Monninger illuminates not only Maine and its people but the human heart.

This is a book well worth reading against the tapestry of our times.

Nancy Grape writes book reviews for the Maine Sunday Telegram.

 

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