are lucky enough to find out that a yet unpublished novel exists. Sadly, he passed away in early 2023.)
I loved this novel. A pile of reel-to-reel tapes are found in the basement of a flooded public library in south central Florida. They were recorded in the 1970s by an elderly man telling the story of his life. He was raised in a series of utopian communes, starting in at a Ruskin colony in Indiana and moving to a Shaker commune in Florida when he was 12. The central part of the story is his teen years spent with the Shakers around 1910 on their utopian commune that sat on 7000 acres of land that is today where Disney World sits.
Very well researched and richly detailed, the narrative told by the central character, Harley Mann, flows and is compelling. It was interesting to learn about the Shakers and about what Florida was like in 1910.
