Miranda Beverly-Whittemore Set Me Free

Set Me Free

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Warner, Mar 2007, $24.99

Friends, family and those he has helped consider Elliott Barrow an idealistic ethical icon. When Native American Cal Fleecing returns from Harvard to his reservation home in Oregon he meets the charismatic caring Elliot and they become close friends with a vision. They open up the Ponderosa Academy in Stolen, Oregon with a dream to provide quality education to Native Americans.

However, Cal hides from Elliot his resentment that everyone thinks the world of the man while ignoring Cal's hardworking contributions. Elliot's first wife theater director Helen Bernstein arrives from Manhattan to direct The Tempest at the school. At about the same time she comes to Stolen, Elliot's teenage daughter Amelia (from another deceased wife) leaves Portland and seventeen years old Willa Llewellyn leaves Connecticut to arrive at the school. Cal realizes he has comrades who share with him resentment of Elliot's constant Pollyanna upbeat philosophy while the offspring pushes hard to learn what really happened to her late mother. When everyone converges in Stolen, Elliot finds himself at the center of a tempest as his statue crumbles from the pedestal.

SET ME FREE is a delightful contemporary work of fiction with a bit of a mystery (the link between the players though somewhat obvious because the hub is evident) due to the strong ties to Shakespeare as all the key players provide perspectives with references back to the Bard especially the Tempest. The storyline predominantly focuses on the relationships between Elliot and everyone else including his late wife as secrets surface in which the others demand of the magnetic Elliot to "SET ME FREE" from his vision, the last words of the Tempest.