Ducks, Newburyport

This novel from the award-winning Ellmann (Sweet Desserts) is a long, free-association, run-on sentence coming from the overactive brain of a mother of four, happily married to an engineering professor. A former college teacher herself, now a professional baker in Newcomerstown, OH, she is also a survivor of open-heart surgery and cancer. Her many obsessions include but are hardly limited to her children, especially her hostile teenage daughter; her mother (from Newburyport), who died young; pies and cinnamon rolls; injustices large and small; old movies; Donald Trump; Marie Kondo; gun violence; industrial pollution; and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Random words such as hydrangea, Djibouti, Giant Viper’s Bugloss, and ducks pop up like tics in her stream of consciousness. The story that emerges from these riffs and ruminations is interrupted only by a tale about a mountain lion, which seems to have nothing to do with the main event until the two ingeniously merge.