One Small Saga

In the early 1950s, a young Albuquerque bride accompanies her husband back to his family home in Denmark, then to London and the British colonies of Jamaica and British Honduras. The narrator endures the company of both pathetic and incorrigible characters while struggling to reconcile her idealization of “The Modern Marriage” with the painful reality of life with a philandering husband.

Through the widening eyes of her protagonist, who develops into a woman of depth and vision, Hawkins creates characters who must adjust to the demands of others and of circumstances. Some relinquish the ability to communicate with others. For a few, adjustment means learning how to communicate with grace and tolerance. Told with humor, compassion, and just a hint of sarcasm, One Small Saga ultimately becomes a story of human compromise and adaptation to the quiet disasters of an ordinary life.

“Hawkins is an articulate, compassionate story-teller with an intuitive grasp of peoples’ idiosyncrasies and the subtle nuances at play in relationships. One is constantly being surprised by her quixotic humor (occasionally edged with sarcasm) and her unique writing style that resembles but is not prose poetry. An absorbing story.”
—Minnesota Women’s Press

“The lack of women’s views is made up for by Hawkins’ novella, a subjective account of a young woman in the 1950s married to a womanizer. Understated and extremely observant, the portrait of others accents the irony of the woman narrator’s situation.”
—Library Journal