For hundreds of years, Quartz Lake in northern Minnesota was home to the Lakota and Ojibwe Indians, towering pines, and enchanting blue waters. As loggers and speculators made their way north from the twin cities, the landscape changed. Settlers and vacationers flooded the area, and resorts began to dominate the shoreline. Rippling back and forth in time, Waterlines takes readers on a journey through the transformation of Quartz Lake, from the days when a small native tribe raised their young and harvested wild rice along its banks, to today, when readers are introduced to Eleanor Marlow, a woman who recounts her childhood memories of the lake, meeting her first love there, and then, as a young woman, experiencing a tragedy in its depths so painful it drove her away. She comes back to the Quartz, some twenty years after the tragic events unfolded, and witnesses the ever-increasing progress and development that have changed the lake, and its inhabitants, from northern wilderness to booming tourist town. What emanates in the ethereal lines of the Quartz Lake water speaks to us about the effects of unchecked progress, materialism, learning how to go the right speed, loss of innocence and home, and the significant role of nature (most specifically water), history, storytelling, and memory, both in one’s inner life, and as connectors to the people and places around us. Waterlines is transcendental fiction; it embodies the philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau. Its structure and rhythms strive to mimic the movement of water, reverberating, much like memory does, in our minds.

Reading Waterlines, you will become more aware and appreciative of the nature and memories of your own life. You'll want to experience all it has to offer, and thus, hold the natural world even more dearly, moving into the future.


About the Author:

Jenny Markert is the author of over 30 children's nature and wildlife books. She has been an American literature and creative writing teacher for over 15 years, and an avid nature observer and advocate. She has loved the outdoors her whole life. She grew up along the shores of a Northern Minnesota lake, much like the one she writes about in her novel Waterlines. She is a scholar of American writers, specifically the transcendental writers of the early 1800s and uses Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Hawthorne for inspiration in her own writing. With Waterlines, she strove to create a new form of fiction, transcendental fiction, combining fictional storytelling with transcendental philosophy and writing. This is her first novel published on eBooks.