The Keene Toadstool Hosts
DK Kennedy
presenting & Signing
Jane's Cure
Saturday, May 6th at 6 pm
Jane Angier won't stop helping women, even if it kills her. And it might.
Trapped in a granite cell, a nineteenth century midwife awaits her trial for the crime of helping women time their pregnancies. Or is she guilty of something far worse?
A trapper's daughter, Jane Angier is a woman of the woods, a free spirit, and a misfit in the Loyalist colony of Queen's Bay, New Brunswick, a beautiful seaside town with ugly secrets. The community is suffering through a set of economic and social disasters. A boatload of Irish immigrants threatens the town with a typhoid epidemic, the bottom has fallen out of the timber trade, and cheap rum turns everyone mean. When Jane loses her family to typhoid, the Queen's Bay midwife takes her on as an apprentice. After Jane takes over the practice, she develops and sells "Jane's Cure for Female Irregularities," a very effective and popular remedy for late periods.
Jane's success threatens the poorly trained doctor trying to grow his practice. He is also threatened by Jane's very close relationship with his wife, a brilliant woman mired in a bad marriage. When Jane helps a rape victim abort, the community's powerful men unite to get her out of Queen's Bay, preferably at the end of a rope.
Jane's Cure is a harrowing tale of women who dare to exercise control over their bodies as they struggle against the first, but not the last, laws banning abortion.
As a young woman, D.K. and her daughter moved from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Cazenovia, a tiny town in upstate New York. At the Women Writers’ Center, she studied writing and literary criticism with second-wave feminists Rita Mae Brown, Kate Millet, Audre Lorde, and Marge Piercy. D.K. has degrees in English and Communication. She taught writing at the University of Massachusetts and the University of New Hampshire, English in both middle and high schools, and finished her teaching career working as a special educator.
On her journey to her present career as a writer, D.K. worked as a museum interpreter at Charles Lindberg’s Minnesota boyhood home. In Alaska, she crewed on a gillnetter, waitressed in a former brothel, and assisted a traveling dentist on a remote island accessible only by plane or boat. The town had 200 residents, a fish packing plant, a mayor but no police, three bars, and 42 dogs.
She worked as a tax mapper in New York, reading colonial-era wills and deeds. In Massachusetts, she worked nights for an answering service that doubled as the local police dispatch line. While in graduate school, she ran a safe house for abused women and children and taught writing to deaf students and court-involved teens.
Until recently, D.K. and her husband ran Hampshire hobby farm where they raised pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, and immense quantities of weeds and a few vegetables. A few years ago, tired of trying to keep their old place heated with six cords of wood, they built a small, solar-powered house with big windows overlooking a pond, a stream, and a tiny garden planted in garlic, lettuce, and zinnias.
When not writing, D. K. raises, hunts, and competes her prize-winning English setters.
