'The Llano County Mermaid Club' sparkles with small-town New Mexico life

Small-town dreamers populate Kathleen M. Rodgers’ welcoming new novel, “The Llano County Mermaid Club.”

The Mermaid Club’s five members are all girls — the three Hubbard sisters, Clover, Marigold, and Tansy — plus Marigold’s close friend Melody and Tansy’s friend Ruthie.

The girls have splashed in a community pool in Sandhill, a fictional town in a fictional county in eastern New Mexico where they live.

They’ve also swum in the Blue Hole, a not-so-fictional small lake near the not-so-fictional Santa Rosa.

They’ve climbed a chain-link fence to sneak in a Sandhill motel pool.

And they’ve taken a dip in the Pecos River.

But they’re holding out to fulfill their big dream — to swim in the ocean. Together.

The sisters’ dad, Dorian Hubbard, promises to take them to see the sea. Promises, promises. Don’t hold your breath, girls.

Letty Hubbard, the sisters’ mom, juggles and struggles to keep her daughters fed, clothed and focused on learning to read and to advance in the world.

Letty, an inveterate reader, finds a second home in Sandhill’s public library and brings her girls along to share its comfort and appeal.

Miss Mavis, a librarian, advises Letty on books and authors of possible interest.

On one library visit, with the three girls in tow, Letty wants to read something by Willa Cather. Miss Mavis suggests three Cather novels, including “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” And by the way, she tells Letty, it’s set in New Mexico.

Letty once harbored her own dreams. She wanted to be a teacher, but motherhood has placed her dream on hold.

Still, Miss Mavis advises Letty she is too young to give up on her dream. She invites Letty to think of the library as a place to start her education.

The deeply emotional scene at the library continues with Clover gazing at a mounted print of the famous black-and-white photograph, “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange.

Clover looked at the photo and said the two children with the forlorn mother “are probably sad and ashamed ’cause they’re poor.”

Clover’s comments may have triggered the tears that streamed down Letty’s face. She swayed, rocking Tansy in her arms as she stood directly in front of the “Migrant Mother.”

Clover reached for Marigold and all of them huddled. Letty sobbed louder, as if Mama had forgotten the rule of the library about silence, Marigold observed.

Miss Mavis wasn’t upset. On the contrary. She consoles Letty and tells her that she and her girls are some of her favorite patrons because they’re respectful and they return books on time.

Miss Mavis was apologetic because she called Letty by her first name, something she doesn’t do with adult library patrons.

Letty, however, was pleased; saying that hearing her first name gave her her own identity.

Miss Mavis is one of the novel’s most memorable secondary female characters because of her abiding kindness.

The library itself is a three-dimensional character that binds the novel to other scenes linked to related literacy subjects.

Letty swapping a skillet for a used Remington 5 typewriter. She’s not planning to write a novel, but simply to see where her imagination and her heart take her. In fact, it carries her to a world where she’s writing diary-like letters to authors Eudora Welty, Kate Chopin and Grace Metalious. They’re never mailed.

Letty reading Rudolfo Anaya’s novel “Bless Me Ultima” and finding magic in the character of the curandera Ultima.

The girls reading Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

The adult Marigold marrying Sawyer, a successful author who dies too soon.

The adult Clover operating the Sugar Beet Bakery and Books in Sandhill.

“The Llano County Mermaid Club” moves back and forth in time — between the present (mostly in the year 2017) and the past (stretching through the decades of the 1960s and ’70s). It takes patience for the reader to adjust, but it’s doable and worth the effort.

Sadness hovers over the characters over time.

There’s the mysterious death of the teenage Melody at Blue Hole in the aftermath of two-timing Dorian ditching his wife and children and moving in with Melody’s mother, Edie. Melody and her Grandma Dot live under the same roof. Dorian’s cheating spells disaster for myriad relationships.

Letty, now 61, is dying of cancer in a hospital bed. Marigold blames her father for his wife’s disease.

Rodgers, the author, said in a phone interview, “For me, I had to find a way for some readers to see the soft side of Dorian. He kind of lost his way, but he always loved his daughters and it took Letty to go back to school to find her autonomy.”

A tender postscript evokes remembered moments of Marigold’s warm, unforgotten friendship with the long-departed Melody and tells of a manuscript of a book she’s written.

The author ties a nice bow around the novel by having the postscript in memory of her mom, Letty, “the sixth mermaid.”

The characters, living or dead, present or past, feel so authentic.

Rodgers knows eastern New Mexico; she was born and raised in Clovis. Rodgers and her husband live in Colleyville, Texas.

'The Llano County Mermaid Club' sparkles with small-town New Mexico life