An event featuring first-time novelist Carla Hagen of Baudette is planned for 1 p.m. Saturday at the Baudette Public Library, 110 First Street Southwest, Baudette, and for 2 p.m. Aug. 17 at the Smiling Moon Cafe, 121 North Main Ave, Baudette.
Hagen will present her award-winning book, “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane.” The event will include Hagen reading from the novel, book sales and signing.
The novel is in its third printing, and was recently honored by the Minnesota Independent Publishers Association with two first place Midwest Book Awards — in the Historical Fiction and Literary Fiction categories.
The novel highlights the story of a 1930s Minnesota-Canadian border community, Faunce Ridge, a paradise for the nonconformists who live there. In the summer of 1936, the federal government declares Faunce a rural slum and decides to relocate all the residents. They send hometown boy Emil Rousseau to photograph the poverty and sell Congress on the resettlement.
But Faunce Ridge is not the Dust Bowl, and people don’t want to leave. Not Magnus, king of the local bootleggers, now married to Rose, Emil’s high school sweetheart. Not Emil’s own mother. Not Sadie, a madam fallen on hard times who runs a hotel in nearby Baudette and makes a profit on Magnus’s moonshine. The harsh and beautiful borderland — a character in its own right — pulls on all of them in ways they never could have imagined as their stories entangle on the way to a dramatic finish.
