A Quilting of Scars – Review from sksmithwrites

SO GRATEFUL for this amazing review by @sksmithwrites

A QUILTING OF SCARS (Now or Never Publishing, 2025), @lucyemblack’s recently released novel of historical fiction, reminds us that we don’t know what someone else is carrying with them through their daily lives, what secrets may linger in the recesses of memory, stirred to surface from time to time.

In 1909, in a small farming community south of Georgian Bay, lifelong bachelor Larkin Beattie lives on the farm where he was raised. A thoughtful man wrestling with the aftermath of a shocking tragedy from his youth, Beattie revisits the events in his later years, processing the impact on his life as well as the lives of his family, his neighbours and the community. The story of what happened comes to us through his recollections and the newspaper coverage of events 50 years earlier.

Impeccably researched, A QUILTING OF SCARS uses immersive details that will ring with a degree of familiarity to anyone who has grown up around farming, or with stories of early farming at the turn of the century passed through the generations. Black creates a world of rural life in the early twentieth century, grounded in universal themes of belonging, identity, faith and love, and what happens when things “don’t come together the way they were meant.”

Black’s prose skilfully carry the reader into the heart of the story with beautiful interiority that captures the complexity of Beattie’s life, his way of understanding the world, and how he comes to terms with loss.

Black’s dialogue employs subtle nods to local dialect and reveals moments of tender fondness between Beattie and his family and between he and his neighbour and friend, Pauley Skinner, a boy whose life is altered forever by the events of the fateful night in their youth.

Beattie’s remembering surfaces the shared humanity underlying the differences that keep us isolated and longing. A QUILTING OF SCARS is a beautifully told story of love and friendship and grief, the ways family and home can be places of safety or risk, and how sometimes we just don’t know what someone has lived through.

P.S. I fell in love with protagonist Larkin Beattie from page 1.