A complex story of relationships and religion

Writers of beloved children’s books hold a special place in the hearts of readers. The creator of a fictional revered figure of this kind, then, has a difficult task: how to make the character worthy of admiration, yet not so perfect that readers can’t relate to her. In Agnes Lee, the protagonist of Alice Elliott Dark’s novel Fellowship Point, readers get the flawed heroine they crave.

Agnes is the octogenarian author and illustrator of a famous series of children’s books about a girl named Nan and her adventures, spanning from the 1965 When Nan Was a Lobsterman to the recent When Nan Ran a Wind Farm. Nan has become the subject of many theses, a “proto-­feminist icon of interest on campus” because she is written “as if equality were a fact.” Agnes is also secretly the author, under the pseudonym Pauline Schulz, of a series of best-selling satirical novels about five women friends, novels that seek to “reveal what a particular person was bound to do under explicit circumstances.” As the story unfolds, she ponders whether to take up another genre and write a memoir.

Agnes and her lifelong best friend, Polly Wister, are both scions of monied Philadelphia Quaker gentry. They are two of the heirs, along with an odious cousin, Archie Lee, from the original five families who set up the compact to have a summer community on the Maine peninsula known as Fellowship Point, which includes a wildlife sanctuary that was once held sacred by its Native American inhabitants. The disposition of this land upon the eventual deaths of Agnes and Polly sets up a good deal of the drama in the plot. Should it be left to a land trust for preservation or enabled to be developed? Are the land’s original Abenaki inhabitants and caretakers entitled to a say in its future, although they were stripped of that right in the past? Will rapacious real estate developers take control before they can be stopped?