Someone funny, someone sad, someone without self-pity, but with self-awareness, someone who hurts and sees and loves the odd, the very ordinary, the bizarre all at the same time, these are qualities hard to come by, and we have them, in Margaret Dawe’s first novel, Nissequott.

Anne Roiphe, The East Hampton Star
Margaret Dawe

Margaret Dawe

Margaret Dawe grew up on Long Island. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, and graduate degrees from Northwestern University in journalism and Brooklyn College in fiction writing. She was a reporter for the East Hampton Star on Long Island. She now lives in New York City.

cover image of the book Nissequott

Nissequott

With wit and soul, _Nissequott’_s young Sheila Gray navigates the obstacle course of growing up. From March 1968 (when Martin Luther King, Jr., is killed and she is ten years old) to October 1973 (when Spiro Agnew resigns), Sheila unfolds her tale of life on Long Island. She watches TV and knows it can slip from I Love Lucy to live coverage of an assassination in the blink of an eye. She reads dirty magazines; she watches friends shoplift and a neighbor function on Thorazine: Sheila is a modern American. She is a girl who sits at the harbor, “looking across for God in the trees.” She is a thoughtful Huck Finn living near a mall.

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Someone funny, someone sad, someone without self-pity, but with self-awareness, someone who hurts and sees and loves the odd, the very ordinary, the bizarre all at the same time, these are qualities hard to come by, and we have them, in Margaret Dawe’s first novel, Nissequott.

Anne Roiphe, The East Hampton Star
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