Meet Local Author Mj Pettengill at the Library

Friends of the Samuel Wentworth Library are pleased to present local author Mj Pettengill, discussing her recent book, The Angels' Lament, in the Community Room of the library in Center Sandwich on Tuesday, July 23, at 4:00 pm. This event, free and open to the public, also features light refreshments. Autographed books will be available for purchase.

The Angels' Lament is Book Two in the Etched in Granite Historical Fiction Series.
For the Hodgdon women, 1872 is a year of reckoning. Alone and determined, 17-year-old Sarah Hodgdon boards a train, trading farm life in New Hampshire for the textile mills of Fall River. Woefully disillusioned, she finds herself trapped in a brutal factory and living in a filthy tenement.

She is tormented when she learns the fate of her family.  Returning home is no longer possible. About to drown in a sea of spindles, she meets lamplighter, August Wood, who illuminates the gap between the affluent and the undesirables that dwell in the murky shadows.

Stripped down to her bare instincts, she retreats into a secret world, that if revealed, would shatter all that remains. Everything collides when Bess, the captivating woman across town, emerges, navigating the dense world of the local elite, offering a glimpse into an era when women were beginning to take the stage. Survival, a resilient thread of music, interweaves their compelling stories, binding them together, unveiling grievous misdeeds from the past.

Mj Pettengill

Mj Pettengill is an author and social historian with a focus on cultural narrative and traditions, collective and intergenerational trauma integration, ancestral healing, and social welfare development.

She is a cellist and has a background in Civil War Musicology and trumpet performance. Before transitioning to the world of writing, she performed as a soloist and with various musical organizations featured in numerous Living Histories, Reenactments, and Historical Events throughout the Northeast.

Mj works and creates in her woodland studio and lives on a farm in North Sandwich, New Hampshire. In addition to writing and music, she is a wildcraft herbalist, aligned with her passion for nature and the ancient healing traditions, customs, and folklore of her ancestors.