A Keeper of Sheep, by William Carpenter '62

Penelope "Penguin" Solstice is the feisty heroine of A Keeper ofSheep, the first novel by award-winning poet William Carpenter '62. Twenty years old, a radical feminist, and "probably the only virgin at Dartmouth College, " she has been expelled for attempting to burn down a fraternity where a rape occurred. But when Penguin "retires" to her father's Cape Cod home and takes on a job caring for a composer dying of AIDS,; she finds her politics inadequate to address the urgent moral questions of the real world. The story of her coming of age is at turns wry and wrenching, and it is always compelling. Carpenter has a poet's gift for empathy and keen ear for emotional detail, and he gives us an intelligent and engaging narrator whose voice is so authentically feminine, you forget the author is a man.

An English professor and founding faculty member at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Carpenter sang with Greensleeves and was in Gamma Delta Chi at Dartmouth. His trips to campus during the eighties to visit his son Matthew '87 partly inspired the opening of the novel.