My Book
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“With vivid and richly textured prose, Brett Ann Stanciu offers unsparing portraits of northern New England life well beyond sight of the ski lodges and postcard views. The work the land demands, the blood ties of family to the land, and to each other, the profound solitude that such hard-bitten lives thrusts upon the people, are here in true measure. A moving and evocative tale that will stay with you, Hidden View also provides one of the most compelling and honest rural woman’s viewpoint to come along in years. A novel of singular accomplishment.” – Jeffrey Lent
“Early in the book, I was swept by a certainty of truths in Hidden View: that Stanciu knew the bizarre and fragile construction that people’s self-deceptions can frame. And that she was telling, out in public, against all the rules, the heartbreaking story of far too many women I’ve known, at one time or another, who struggled to make their dreams come to reality in situations…. …(In Hidden View) the questions of loyalty to person, commitment to dreams, and betrayal of the helpless are as vivid as the flames in the sugarhouse, as sweet and dangerous as the hot boiling maple sap on its way to becoming valuable syrup. There’s so much truth in this book that at some point, it stops being “fiction” and stands instead as a portrait, layered, complex, and wise. The Vermont that we love, the farms that we treasure, the children we nurture are fully present.” – Kingdom Books, Beth Kanell
“Stanciu is a Vermonter’s writer. Anyone who loves the landscape and language of Vermont will be drawn into this story, but her writing holds a universal appeal, too, and rings true with the language and landscape of the human heart and mind as well. The characters in Hidden View are people you’re going to think about, and care about, long after the book is read.” – Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, AS LONG AS THERE ARE MOUNTAINS
Category Archives: gardening
Woodchuck
Geese fly overhead in the dark evening, so near I hear their wings beating. Frost hovers, gathering strength. Yeah, my daughter says, that’s what geese do. They’re out of here! The garden’s gone wild at the end of the season, its … Continue reading
Miniature Mandibles
I’m reading outside with my bare feet on the firepit stones when I feel something like my cat’s tongue on my toe. I’m reading intently, in the few remaining minutes before my daughter returns from soccer practice and my attention … Continue reading
Peonies
On my walk to the co-op, I stop at a bed of peonies and cup a giant blossom in my hands: perfect white stained with drops of red, like a strange variation of the drops of blood on the snow … Continue reading
Little Bits of Beauty
Taking out the trash from the library today, I stopped by the crabapple tree planted at the back school entrance no one uses anymore. My goodness! An utter profusion of beauty by the stinking compost! On this warm day, in … Continue reading
2,000 Miles, a Handful of Hours
What a strange, odd thing to travel 2,000 miles over the earth’s curve, all in the piece of one day. We began in that incredibly quiet hour between 1 and 2 a..m., standing in my parents’ kitchen, drinking coffee with … Continue reading
February Yields To March
The snow lies so deeply around our house I might be wrong about that slender path, first through the transplanted hydrangeas from Susan and then along the milkweed behind the garden. Down the hill, through the wild tangle of pine … Continue reading
Mid-October Garden
In the garden, fat Brussels sprouts nestle against the stalks. My daughter says two words when she sees them: With bacon. While the light funnels away — every single day, a little less — the remaining flowers in my garden … Continue reading
Lady Lupine
Here’s a line from a children’s picture book — my younger daughter’s favorite — You must do something to make the world more beautiful. Last evening, I overhead the girls planning to spread lupine seeds gleaned from the flowers blooming before … Continue reading
Walls of Blossoms
One of the pieces of work I picked up this spring involved the famous CDC-Kaiser Permanente study about Adverse Childhood Experiences — fascinating, but not an uplifting read. This study, not surprisingly, recorded that one way to break the cycle of … Continue reading
