The Rattled Bones(82)

A unique thanks goes to Rilla Brae for allowing my protagonist to borrow her beautiful name. To my fabulous agent, Melissa Sarver White—thank you for always championing my work. And to my editor, Nicole Ellul, thank you for your endless cheering, your tireless devotion, and all your beautiful exclamation marks!!!

Final thanks goes to my family. While you are mentioned here last, you are always first in my heart. You are my whole heart.





Author’s Note


As a storyteller, I am at home in the heart of a story. I ache for stories. So when I came across a radio and photo documentary named “Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold,” I was immediately intrigued. The untold stories are often the most important ones.

While this book is a novel, Malaga Island is a real place, located just off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine. I have tried to stay true to the ecological—marine and land—environments that reflect life on Malaga and life fishing Maine’s coast today. Any errors in representation are completely my own.

Malaga’s history of forced eviction and forced institutionalization is real. The orchestrated cultural erasure took place in 1911 and 1912, though I have moved the historical occurrences to 1931 and 1932 respectively for the sake of this novel’s contemporary storyline. In 1912 Governor Frederick W. Plaisted evicted forty-five innocent people from Malaga Island. Plaisted had eight residents committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. The schoolhouse was moved to another island. Malaga graves were dug up and seventeen bodies were interred in five graves at the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded.

James McKenney is mentioned in this novel and by all accounts served as “the king” of Malaga, as he was regarded as one of the best fishermen along the coast. He was the island leader during the eviction. Eliza Griffin lived on Malaga in a sea captain’s wheelhouse and left behind traps that are helping researchers understand the evolution of fishing. Agnes, as well as all contemporary characters in the novel, are a creation of my imagination.

My research was intended to gather historical facts but it also illuminated a pervasive and enduring legacy of shame that is still suffered by many of the descendants of the Malaga Island community. It is my hope that my work of fiction has explored the events surrounding Malaga Island and its residents thoughtfully. I hope this story will help to inspire a generation of teen readers to research the full scope of factual events that occurred on Malaga Island. I hope that a collective effort to bring the story to light will help to lift the enduring shame of islanders being falsely labeled “feeble-minded” and “immoral.”

I am grateful for the ongoing academic and cultural interest in Malaga Island’s history and the recent articles that have appeared in Maine’s The Working Waterfront, Bangor Daily News, and Maine Sunday Telegram. These articles, along with the research being conducted by the University of Southern Maine—and the exhibit at Maine State Museum—are helping to tell the real story of the Malaga Island fishing community in a way that newspapers from the time did not.

While recent Maine governors have apologized to the families of the Malaga Island victims, it is still unsettling to know that deceased Malaga Island residents remain buried in combined graves on the grounds of the former state institution. Malaga’s families were proud fishing families whose ancestors had populated the islands throughout Casco Bay since the 1700s or earlier. It seems time to return the deceased home to Malaga, to the shores where their familial and cultural roots run deep.