In a month that’s seen the media buzzing about this summer’s big box office epic, “Homer’s Odyssey,” comes Friday’s publication of “Last Day on the Blue Wonder,” a novel in which a modern-day Odysseus — an American Afghan vet named Andy Herring, longs for home and the love of a good woman — but finds the journey fraught, not with mythic divine demons, but demons nonetheless.
Home for Andy is not, of course, a mythical island kingdom, but it is an island, the very real island of Gloucester, where his recently deceased father’s beloved tuna boat, Blue Wonder, sits in the harbor waiting for Andy to captain it back out to sea.
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By Joann Mackenzie | Staff Writer
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