The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Ellmann, Lucy. Ducks, Newburyport. Galley Beggar Press, 2019.

Ducks, Newburyport is a political fiction novel told through the first-person narrative perspective of its unnamed protagonist. The protagonist is a middle-aged mother who lives in Newcomerstown, Ohio, and spends her days baking apple pies while contemplating the deterioration of America. These thoughts are interspersed with those of a wild lioness in search of her stolen cubs. Both stories converge when the lioness circulates Newcomerstown, forcing its residents to hide in their homes until an Indigenous tracker captures her.

The protagonist alternates between her anxieties about contemporary America, memories from her youth, and the daily events that interrupt these ponderings in her stream-of-consciousness narration. Throughout the novel, the protagonist worries about not only the political, environmental, and social issues plaguing her nation but also the circumstances that preceded this destruction. Specifically, she laments the despicable violence non-Indigenous Americans inflicted against Indigenous communities across the country. The protagonist makes explicit connections between this historic oppression and its lasting impacts on the Indigenous people in her life, such as Frank and Stacy.

The protagonist frequently disrupts these observations with formative memories from her childhood in America and Britain. Most of these incidents evoke guilt for the protagonist, especially those related to her deceased parents. In particular, the untimely death of Mommy from a terminal illness haunts the protagonist even in adulthood, making her feel like an incomplete and inadequate mother herself. When reflecting on Mommy, the protagonist often considers a near-death experience her mother had at age two in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Mommy chased ducks into a pond before she could swim and nearly drowned. This story leads the protagonist to entertain existential questions about how she, her siblings, and her children would never have been born if Mommy had died as a toddler.

The protagonist occasionally returns to the present when she is forced to explore the world beyond her home or external visitors enter her domestic space. Ellmann suggests that public settings trouble the protagonist when she encounters hurtles while navigating them. The first time the protagonist leaves home for a dental appointment and pie delivery, her car breaks down on the cold highway. When the protagonist later takes her children shopping, they all get stranded in the mall. These incidents confirm her anxieties about the unpredictability of unfamiliar places. Similarly, the protagonist experiences discomfort when Ronny delivers chicken feed to her house. She keeps him safely outside of her domestic domain to prevent his unusual behavior from infiltrating the home. When Ronny eventually does attack the protagonist and her children in their kitchen, he destroys the sanctuary provided by this once-soothing space.

Ellmann gives Ducks, Newburyport coherence through the lioness. Her structured narrative arc acts as an adhesive that provides textual continuity within the novel. Though the lioness and her cubs initially live a relatively peaceful life in the outskirts of Ohio, humans ruin this oasis by capturing the cubs and displaying them in a zoo. The lioness travels tirelessly across the state, determined to reclaim her kittens only to reunite with them in captivity. Ducks, Newburyport ends with the lioness resigning herself to a caged existence with her cubs, and the protagonist taking her family to visit this symbol of maternal protectiveness at the zoo.