Ernie's Ark

“In this extraordinary book, Monica Wood plumbs the depths of the human soul with a perceptive eye and a generous heart. Ernie's Ark tells the story of a quixotic quest born of grief and longing and its reverberations throughout a small Maine mill town. As its inhabitants—husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and enemies—take stock of themselves and each other, their relationships deepen and expand in unexpected ways. Each of them carries hidden passions and quiet griefs, long-held resentments and unrequited dreams. Like Elizabeth Strout, her fellow chronicler of small-town Maine life, Wood imbues her characters with the complexity and humanity of real people. Ernie's Ark is as true as life.”—Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train
“Each story can easily stand alone, yet every new one contains an object or memory we've seen in a previous story, usually from another perspective. The overall effect is one of panorama, the sense that though we haven't met everyone in Abbott Falls, we've cast a good long glance at the range of hopes and heartaches the town contains.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Ernie's Ark [contains] the subtly disguised idea that anger, loss, and desperation are related and must be confronted…The loving character portraits that form her stories help us understand not only the people of Maine but also the human condition…Though Wood admires the people with whom she shares Maine, she neither patronizes nor reveres them. They regret, they love, they rally around each other, they hope. [Abbott Falls] is not such a bad place to live.”—The Boston Globe
“Ernie's Ark ultimately asks what our response to sorrow says about us. Looming like a silent smokestack is Abbott Falls itself, the tragedy each of the characters share. Held up to Wood's previous two novels—longer, thorough examinations of a single relationship—Ernie's Ark might seem a bit slight. And yet like an honest day's work, it is both simple and more than enough.”—San Francisco Chronicle