Title: Liberty Loomis
Author: Susan Denman
Publisher: Toplink Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 978-1-948779-79-1
Pages: 232
Genre: Fiction
Reviewed by: Tara Mcnabb
Hollywood Book Reviews
In Susan Denman’s first novel, her experiences growing up in the Catskill Mountains followed by a job in the medical field are depicted through fresh and spirited prose, resulting in a story that is also a fascinating memoir.
For 20-year-old Mayzie Jenkins, her ambitions for medical school push her to pursue a summer job at a rural hospital in the Catskills, where she hopes the position will help her application stand out from the crowd. Working as a nurse’s aid, she is not surprised to find that her daily duties are less than exciting. What is surprising, however, are the many ways in which the patients she cares for begin to influence her life and world-view in ways she never expected. Her immersion in the medical field is fraught with both tragedy and joy as she endures the loss of friends while making new ones along the way. But after everything she’s been through, Mayzie has yet to face her toughest challenge; deeply buried childhood memories are beginning to bubble to the surface, threating to disrupt a cultivated denial and willful ignorance of the past. Can Mayzie face this awful memory head-on, without being consumed by the pain of remembrance?
Denman chose one of the most intriguing periods in American history to set her novel; the tumultuous 1970’s. An era of cataclysmic social and political change, the choice is a clever one, and serves to both mimic and reinforce Mayzie’s inner turmoil. This was a time rife with reckonings of all kinds, where the individual was forced to ask hard questions about the future and their place in the world. Mayzie’s youth is a metaphor for the chaos and confusion that accompanies our coming-of-age experiences, whether they be in environments of our own making or seemingly foreign surroundings. Either way, we are bound to emerge from these struggles a different person, with new ideas about ourselves and where we are headed. The urgency of youth is portrayed successfully against the somewhat constricting existence of hospital life; an environment that nevertheless fosters unforeseen transformations.
It is fortunate that Denman herself worked as a nurse’s aid in a rural hospital, much like the one portrayed in the novel. The descriptions of the everyday challenges facing medical staff are vivid and heart-wrenching, and could only come from someone who’s seen them firsthand. This includes the medical terminology and technical aspects of patient care, which enrich the story’s setting and visualize for the reader the daily duties of those devoted to the sick. Now a physician herself, Denman brings a varied and unique perspective to a genre full of clichés and old tropes. The way our mind can play tricks on us and our ability to camouflage memories into harmless ghosts is explored and examined from a rare viewpoint often missing in most coming-of-age dramas.
A story of deliverance from the traps of our own making, Liberty Loomis stands as a worthy contribution to the discerning reader’s bookshelf.