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"Happy Birthday, Tom Forbes!"
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Welcome!
Have you read LAZY BEDS, the newest title in Ruth Doan MacDougall's Snowy Series? It's available in both print and ebook formats. You may place orders through the Frigate Bookshop, where you'll find several purchasing options for both thepaperback and e-book versions. All titles in The Snowy Series are available.
Ruth usually updates her Facebook page on Sunday mornings. Join the conversation! (The Facebook entries are all reprinted HERE as well.)
The Snowy Series
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Ruth Doan MacDougall's Snowy Series
THE CHEERLEADER
The book that started it all—fifty years ago!
Meet Snowy and her wide circle of friends, growing up in the post-World War II era of rigidly-defined roles for women. While Snowy yearns for the social success that a small-town high school can offer, her ambitions extend past that, toward the personal success that only a good college education can bring. In THE CHEERLEADER, you'll begin an adventure with the engaging,
enduring characters whose stories continue, over subsequent titles in Ruth Doan MacDougall’s Snowy Series, into contemporary times.
Searchingly honest, achingly real, THE CHEERLEADER recalls all the joy, excitement, and pain of crossing the bridge from childhood to young womanhood in the Fabulous Fifties, when sex was still a mystery and goals were clearly defined—perhaps for the last time.
Ruth briefly describes how THE CHEERLEADER came to be here.
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SNOWY
What happened next?
Ruth Doan MacDougall received countless letters from devoted fans of THE CHEERLEADER asking this question. She answered it by writing SNOWY, which chronicles how the cute blond cheerleader spends her next thirty years.
Though Snowy and her friends came of age in the 1950s, when roles were clearly defined, each follows a unique path over the next few decades, coping with the challenges of college, marriage, parenthood, emotional health, aging parents, and finding a fulfilling career during a time of rapid changes in American society.
Says the Library Journal, “Readers should prepare to laugh out loud and cry in earnest as former high school cheerleader Henrietta Snow grows up in this delightful sequel to The Cheerleader."
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HENRIETTA SNOW
Our Silent Generation has dropped out of sight between our parents’ generation and the baby boomers. Nobody knows about us."
But you will know!
Fans of Snowy and Bev and Puddles, Tom, Dudley, the twins, and all the Gang from Gunthwaite High School will thoroughly enjoy this next stage of our beloved characters' lives, as they turn fifty and—eek!—sixty as the millennium approaches. How do they adjust to their limitations, deal with grief, and face the realization that this may be their last chance at love, success, and happiness?
Said one reader, "This is a CHEERLEADER fan's dream book, answering almost every 'What if...?' and 'What ever happened to...?' question we could have had. But more than just an extended reunion with characters I adore, the story itself is fabulous—a great and wonderful treat for people like me, who've loved Snowy for decades now."
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THE HUSBAND BENCH
or Bev's Book
It's Bev's turn!
Bev was tall, with short thick auburn hair. She looked older, more finished, than the other girls in their class. And she was green-eyed and beautiful, but she loved to make faces.
That was Beverly Colby at age fifteen, Snowy’s best friend in THE CHEERLEADER. Now, at sixty, her hair is white but she has remained a beauty and she still loves to make faces. And in THE HUSBAND BENCH, she is starring in a book of her own.
The co-captain of the basketball team, Roger was tall and coolly jaunty, a senior and so suave.
That was Roger Lambert, Bev’s boyfriend, whom eventually Bev married. After decades together, their marriage has evolved into an unconventional one, with the two living in different states, but Bev finds that it suits her. While she cherishes the success she has found in her chosen profession, Bev must deal with changing family circumstances while adjusting to a surprise that will have a tremendous impact on her life.
Bev’s complex love life becomes even more intricate as THE HUSBAND BENCH explores love in various forms, from pure to complicated—selfless, selfish, serious, comic.
What is a husband bench?
From the foreword by Ann Norton Holbrook: “‘The husband bench’ refers to the ubiquitous seats all over malls and grocery stores where ostensibly patient husbands, with little else to take up their time, wait for their wives to finish shopping. Typically, MacDougall invests this with telling irony.”
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A BORN MANIAC
or Puddles's Progress
I’m a Maine native, a born Maniac.”—Jean Pond Cram, aka Puddles
Puddles may have been born in Maine, but where are her real roots? She spent her teens in New Hampshire and her married life in South Carolina. Did she establish roots in these states to which she was transplanted? Or has she truly been a displaced person all these years?
The most uninhibited of THE CHEERLEADER’s three friends, intrepid Puddles was leading a settled life when a trip to visit Maine relatives becomes her route to adventure involving an island, a castle, hard decisions, and rebirth.
From the foreword by Ann Norton Holbrook: Puddles is “just as hilarious as when she chased Snowy around a 1950s Woolworth’s with giant underwear.”
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A GUNTHWAITE GIRL
The cabin fever of winter had become spring fever.
When shy Henrietta Snow is asked to lead a tour of the hometown places that have inspired her poems, she panics. She can’t do it! But her best friend Bev bracingly tells her she can, and their skeptical friend, Puddles, agrees to drive down from Maine to join them in a trial run.
The Gunthwaite triumvirate thus reunites, setting forth together into the past on a day trip that will affect the way they look forward into their futures.
If you have not read the earlier titles in Ruth Doan MacDougall's Snowy Series, A GUNTHWAITE GIRL will serve as an introduction to the main characters so that you can more fully enjoy the next title, SITE FIDELITY
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SITE FIDELITY
"Site fidelity" is an ornithological term for birds' instinctive migration back to their place of origin. But what Snowy wants is another site, a fresh start. Woodcombe, the New Hampshire town in which she has lived for twenty years, and Gunthwaite, her nearby hometown, now seem to her like prisons. She is confined by her surroundings and memories, by family and financial worries, by her work at her general store, and she hankers for what she calls a Maine-style Bali Ha’i, an island she has visited with her friend Puddles, where the scenery is “the ever-changing ocean, not the motionless mountains.” How can she escape?
Is this longing for change a part of aging? How can she leave the responsibilities that tie her down? A medical challenge provides an unexpected opportunity, and Snowy finds new profoundness in those ancient words “for better or worse, in sickness and in health.”
Frigate Books offers autographed copies, no sales tax, and free shipping.
To read an e-version, select the e-book version compatible with your app.
LAZY BEDS
LAZY BEDS, the latest title in Ruth Doan MacDougall’s Snowy Series, continues the stories of Snowy and Bev as they weather this century's Great Recession. Snowy is worried about the financial health of her three small stores, while Bev, owner of a well-known real-estate agency, is finding that real-estate sales have essentially ceased.
Snowy and Bev share their adventures and challenges in equal measure, but Puddles, and many of the friends that readers have come to enjoy, have not been neglected. In LAZY BEDS, readers will catch up with the Gang they first met in THE CHEERLEADER—still going strong after all these years!
What's a "lazy bed"?
A home gardener, planting potatoes, might use the "lazy bed" method that avoids the more intensive forms of garden labor but still produces impressive results.
Frigate Books offers autographed copies, no sales tax, and free shipping.
To read an e-version, select the e-book version compatible with your app.
Reader Features
Since 2018 Ruth has continued her "Ruth's Neighborhood" entries on her Facebook page. Ruth updates this column each week, usually on Sunday mornings, and fans are welcome to join the ongoing conversation. Below is this week's entry.
This entry and the directory of all previous entries, are archived HERE.
THE CHEERLEADER's 50th Anniversary
March 19, 2023
To read below you may need to scroll.
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Cheerleader. Like all such numbers, it’s hard to believe—FIFTY years???!!! I’ve found myself time-traveling back to the 1970s, when I sat down to write about the 1950s.
As I’ve described before, the suggestion came from my editor at Putnam’s, Harvey Ginsberg. In my previous novel, One Minus One, the narrator delved into her high-school diaries and I quoted from them, and I think this gave him the idea. He also sensed that there was nostalgia for the quieter Fifties after the Swinging Sixties. While I was working on the final draft of One Minus One, Harvey invited Don and me to visit him, and when we chatted in his Manhattan apartment before we went out to dinner Harvey asked what I had in mind for my next novel. I replied that I hadn’t thought further than this final draft. He said, “Why don’t you write about high school in the 1950s?”
I immediately knew he was right and I laughed and said, “Yes!”
After I finished One Minus One and before I began the new novel (working title The Silent Generation), I reread my high-school diaries. I intended this to be research, such as getting slang right (“she went ape,” etc.), but during my reading I became immersed in the intensity of those years; the reading was excruciating, poignant, and hilarious. (I do enjoy Arthur Koestler’s observation: “Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.”)
On the back pages of my diaries I had kept a month-by-month list of hit songs. This was a great help, but I marveled at my young self for doing it, for having some instinct or need to document this piece of history.
Then I asked Penny and friends in my Class of 1957 what they remembered about the clothes, food, cheers, and such.
From 1968 to 1971 Don and I were living in Dover, New Hampshire, and here I started writing the book. The story begins on March 4, 1955. Later Penny asked me if I’d used that date because March fourth was the birthday of Annie Laurie, our Sheltie. No, I’d used it because I wanted a Friday in early March, but the coincidence of Laurie’s birthday struck me as a good sign, good luck.
The first sentence, “The dance had begun,” was inspired by Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels, several of which I’d read and liked.
We were spending our third year in an upstairs apartment in a big Victorian house and were ready to settle down, to buy house at last. We did, a prefab log cabin on twenty-five acres (including a old apple orchard and a bog) in Farmington, NH. Here I continued work on the book. I’d set it in a fictional version of our hometown, Laconia, but for Bev’s home I used our Farmington setting; I replaced the log cabin with a farmhouse and barn and gave the place a distant lake view.
In this Farmington house, one day our living-room furniture got knocked around after I’d asked Don how a center could make a touchdown, so that Tom could in the book. Using the rug as a football field, Don (Laconia High School center) and Penny’s husband (a few years later an LHS quarterback) energetically figured out an answer to my question, while Penny and I laughed and laughed.
Fifty years ago!
©2023 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.
Other News and Updates
Here Now! The May 15, 2022 issue
by Jen, E-Blast Editor
E-Blast editor Jennifer Davis-Kay, surrounded by some of her favorite books.
The E-Blast is your connection to news updates!
The E-Blast is an occasional publication of news and notes for Ruth’s fans. Here you’ll get background on your beloved characters, stories from Ruth on different inspirations for particular scenes, recipes from the books, a deeper look into Ruth’s writing beyond The Snowy Series, and so much more!
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If you missed any of the issues published thus far, you can find them here:
Issue #1: Fall 2020
Issue #2: December 2020
Issue #3: April 2021
Issue #4: February 2022
If you have a question for Ruth or an idea for a future story, don’t hesitate to e-mail Jen.
Other Books by Ruth Doan MacDougall
A WOMAN WHO LOVED LINDBERGH
This story, set in the 1950s, shifts backward and forward through generations and years, focusing on a daughter who in one summer grows to understand her mother—and, through her mother, herself. During the summer of 1952, thirteen-year-old Lydia Dearborn must navigate into the unknown toward the horizon of maturity, discovering the terrors and responsibilities of adventure and independence, always aware of her mother’s hero, Charles Lindbergh, who had made a historic first flight across an unexplored sky.
This is a PDF e-book that can be read using the (free) Adobe Reader or other PDF reader that is familiar to you. If you download and read other PDF files on your electronic device, you will be able to read this one.
PURCHASE from Frigate Books
Delivery via e-mail within 48 hours of your purchase.
MUTUAL AID
As its heroine, Mercy Blodgett, says of herself, she seems to be related to almost everybody in the small town of Chiswick, New Hampshire—and to those she isn’t, her husband, Bob, is likely to be.
Just when a mill closing in 1986 costs the Blodgetts their jobs, the town is suddenly terrorized by an arsonist, and heart attacks may cost Bob his life.
The title refers to the emergency system in which fire departments from neighboring towns assist each other, but it also emphasizes the interdependence of all people, whether they are family, friends, or—as with Mercy and the young man who has become her pen pal—strangers at the outset. The word “aid” also summons up the word “AIDS,” and this too is part of the story.
PURCHASE from Frigate Books
ONE MINUS ONE
It’s 1969, and after a devastating divorce, 30-year-old Emily Bean leaves her home to work as a teacher in New Hampshire’s coastal region. Emily struggles to adjust to single life in the freewheeling sixties, a time of turmoil for the United States—an era that comes vividly alive through frequent references to the food, drink, and dress of the times. Noted one Goodreads reader, “I wanted Emily to find love and to find herself, all the while worrying that the two goals might not be compatible for her quite yet.”
Selected by Nancy Pearl as part of her "Book Lust" series for amazon.com. The book is vailable in print, Kindle, and audiobook versions.
Purchase from amazon.com only
Currently Out of Print
These are not in print at this time but can generally be found on various book-sale websites (e.g., BookFinder.com), in libraries, or at used-book stores.
• THE LILTING HOUSE
• THE COST OF LIVING
• WIFE AND MOTHER
• AUNT PLEASANTINE
• THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST
• A LOVELY TIME WAS HAD BY ALL
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News of interest to readers is primarily shared here on the website and through Ruth's Facebook column, usually updated weekly, on Sunday morning. Ruth’s current entry is also posted here; earlier entries (including "Ruth's Neighborhood" from this website’s incarnation) are linked from the menu list on that same page.
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