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"LILY'S GHOST" Gardiner author's novel
a powerful voice for women.
By LYNN ASCRIZZI
Staff Writer
The heroic deeds of women who serve in war have long been minimized.
Until recently, military women have received little official recognition
for their contributions and the ordeals they have endured.
Now, Cheryl Drake Harris of Gardiner gives these women a powerful voice
in her debut novel, "Lily's Ghost" (Random House, 2006), set in Maine in
the post-Vietnam era. The story centers on Lily Townsend, who had served
as a doctor in Vietnam.
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In a skillfully crafted collage of first-person memories and inner
dialogue, Harris describes Lily's battle-scarred psyche. Her tormented,
postwar flashbacks burst like grenades in unexpected places on the page:
" . . . I close my eyes and see the mist that rises up from the valley,
how the flares make it glow pink like clouds of cotton candy, as if it
were spun high in the sky over Pleiku, and always with this image comes
the smell of blood. It's under my fingernails, and I feel it, dark and
arterial, bloodying the skin under the saturated cloth of my fatigues;
aware of it only now, after the kid is gone. I watch as he fast turns to
stone, blue-white granite, polished and cool."
Even when she pushes a cart down the supermarket aisle, she is haunted
by the image of a child who died of napalm burns:
"No one would get I'm crazy. No one would guess that I just saw a dead
child who seems to have followed me from the Highlands of Vietnam . . . ."
But now, she is caught up in a whole other war with different casualties
...fighting a bitter custody battle for her young son.
"Lily feels as real to me as my own family. She has a family. . . and is
trying to get through the nightmares of Vietnam and a marriage that has
been destroyed," Harris said.
The idea for the book was triggered while she was teaching English at
Southern Maine Community College. She saw a documentary about women in
war, which included an interview of American nurses in Vietnam.
...
(excerpted by permission:
David Offer, Kennebec Journal)
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