Editor’s Note: It’s a good time to read – we’ve a deep need to feel connected, need something to do when everything’s closed, or perhaps just require distraction from anxiety and fear. So we’re asking Mainers to tell us, in their own words, what they’re reading and why. We start with Gibson Faye-LeBlanc, a poet, teacher and the executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. 

“Jessica Anthony’s high-speed, high-comedy new novel, “Enter the Aardvark,” features a stuffed aardvark, an awful Republican congressman, and an inspired Victorian taxidermist.

If that all sounds absurd, it is, in the most beautiful way.

It’s ultimately a story about the consequences of trying to be something other than what you are and the consequences of societies that try to tell some people they can’t love each other, and it’s all delivered with large doses of great writing, humor and heart.

It’s also a very quick read, which is helpful during this time of social distancing if, like me, between working from home and managing kids schooling at home, you actually have more work to do, not less.

Bonus: author Jessica Anthony lives in Portland and teaches creative writing at Bates.”

 

—Gibson Faye-LeBlanc