The Clover Girls

 By Viola Shipman

Graydon House     2021

416 pages           Fiction

 Viola Shipman has a great ability to capture the reader’s attention right off the bat. She did so in The Summer Cottage when the protagonist arrived at her childhood summer cottage in Saugatuck, Michigan. I related to the book immediately. The same thing happened when I began The Clover Girls, when the author used the words of an old camp song, “Land of the Silver Birch.” I was immediately hooked. How did the author know the song I used to teach when I was a camp counselor?

                                        Land of the silver birch,
                                           Home of the beaver
                                                 Where still the mighty moose
Wanders at will.
Blue lake and rocky shore
I will return once more
Boom diddy-ah da, boom boom

Boom diddy-ah da, boom boom

The plot centers on four girls, Elizabeth, Veronica, Rachel, and Emily who were best friends for all the years they either attended or were counselors at Camp Birchwood in Glen Arbor Michigan. Now, many years later when all are middle aged, they are invited back to the camp by Emily, who is dying. She asks them to repair the friendships that had been broken by perceived betrayal by spending a week together at the camp, and then she dies. The very wary women are not at all the idealistic girls they were when they were campers, but they return to the camp in honor and memory of Emily. Each have existing life challenges that they are facing, and they also have memories about how their friendships ended. Each had remained Emily’s friend, but the group friendship has been over for many years. The Clover Girls tells the tale of how their love and respect for each other is renewed. Additionally, the three remaining Clover Girls each use this retreat time to gain an understanding of their own personal struggles, and at the end of the week, their lives begin to be transformed. One reviewer told readers to “Grab a glass of sweet tea.”

I have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand why The Clover Girls didn’t particularly resonate with me, and I have come to the conclusion that I have just read too many introspective books lately, and I have thought too much about what I’ve been thinking. The need of the Clover Girls to use the week at camp to come to terms with their life issues just seemed like too much after I had journeyed through The Girl in the Red Boots, In Praise of Retreat, Dusk, Night, Dawn, and Faces. It wasn’t the fault of the book, the author, the Clover Girls, the setting, or the plot. It was me. (I think I need to read a good mystery.) Don’t let my musings deter you from reading this beautifully written meditation on friendship, middle age, life challenges, and forgiveness.

 The author Wade Rouse didn’t appear on my radar until I was offered a copy of The Summer Cottage in 2019, and I realized that it was a novel about Saugatuck, Michigan, one of my favorite places. (I absolutely loved The Summer Cottage.) Rouse writes his novels using his grandmother’s name, Viola Shipman. He and his husband spend their summers in Saugatuck, and all of his novels have Lake Michigan settings. Rouse has a very unique ability to get into the life space of women, and all of the protagonists in his several best sellers are women.

My book club had the great good fortune to Zoom with Rouse when we met to discuss The Summer Cottage last month, and several of us are going to hear him in a live book reading of The Clover Girls in June. This book comes out tomorrow.

Wade Rouse’s Viola Shipman website.