A lyrical new children’s book tells the story of a day in the life of Rockland’s lobster woman

The fact that Virginia Oliver was still actively lobstering from her Rockland home base when she turned 101 earned her quite a bit of attention: a story on National Public Radio, another on CBS News. When a short film about her aired on Maine Public, Bangor author Alexandra S. D. Hinrichs decided it was time to tell her story in a children’s book. The result, illustrated by Peaks Island resident Jamie Hogan, is a sight to behold.

Like another award-winning Maine illustrator, Melissa Sweet, who lives in Portland, Hogan works by hand rather than digitally, with an eye for detail and a reverence for the old way of life. Her pastels are lovingly and richly rendered, and one—a full-page sunrise over Virginia’s native island—I’d happily hang on my wall. Her characters are expressive and engaging without being cloying. In a scene where Virginia visits her doctor to get seven stitches after being bitten by a crab, the looks on the doctor’s face and Virginia’s as she ponders an answer to his question—What the hell were you doing there?—are priceless.

“The Lobster Lady” – as Virginia is commonly known – follows a typical day in her life: She rises before dawn to eat a chocolate doughnut (baked by herself the night before), drinks some coffee (in a Moody’s Diner mug), puts on her lipstick and earrings, fuels up the lobster boat with her son Max in it, and sets out to sea. But after the crab mishap and a visit to the doctor, his question triggers memories of how she got to this point.

Oliver grew up on the Neck, a small island off the coast of another island off Rockland. Her parents ran a store and a blacksmith shop there, and even built a dance hall. While the photographs take us through Virginia’s childhood, Hinrichs’ prose is equally evocative: “the smell of sawdust, the roar of bellows, the chatter in the shop.” Eventually, she had to move to Rockland in the winters to go to school, where she lived with her grandfather and aunts. Again, Hogan evokes the details of Rockland from the turn of the century: the Courrier Gazette at breakfast, Virginia’s old library card, cans of Maine Maid sardines, and the imposing stone post office, “built with the island granite she had in her too.”

She is outspoken and fearless (“afraid of nothing!”), and indeed seems to have a granite will. At age eight, she sailed her first lobster boat—”on an ocean full of boats full of boys.” After marrying a lobsterman, she goes to work in a sardine factory, then in a printing house—until one day she can’t work anymore. Her husband comes home to find her there: she has quit her job, she says, and wants to go lobster fishing with him instead. She insists, and he agrees.

So to answer the doctor’s question about what she was doing on a lobster boat in her advanced years, she says simply, “I wanted to go. So I did.” And she’s still doing it, now that she’s 104 — surely the oldest person catching lobsters in Maine, and possibly the world: “a fiercely independent, loving, lobster-catching woman.”

Amy MacDonald is a children’s author and freelance writer. She lives in Portland and Vinalhaven and can be reached at [email protected].

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