Michael Calderone is a choral director from Costa Rica preparing Carmina Burana, Justina Trimble is a new French professor, two good-looking but quirky people at a small New Hampshire college who can’t get enough of each other and struggle to find a togetherness that fits them. An unresolved romance from his past breaks into their lives, stirring up Michael’s old dream of operatic greatness, and Justina’s old feelings of insecurity and fear of being left. Their efforts to connect to Grace, a promising but emotionally battered young singer, increase the stakes: through the clamor of bitterness will they hear their voices calling to each other? The singing check-out lady, the visiting French scholar with Gargantuan appetites, the pal from the English department who masks his loneliness with a patter of wisecracks, a boisterous choir and other supporting characters animate the story, offering their own takes on what love’s got to do with it. This novel evokes a time and place in small-town America’s not-so-distant past when in spite of misplaced efforts it was possible to attain a state of simple human grace. Lapwing reminds us of the vulnerability of love and of its steady power.
