My Book
Click above to purchase.
“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
Tag Archives: childhood
Milkweed Season
Walking through a field on my way to the post office, I find tasseled milkweed seeds, strewn across the trampled grass. When she was a toddler in a hand-me-down stroller, my now 13-year-old loved to pick apart milkweed pods and … Continue reading
Childhood
We drove to Maine and back on a Sunday, my older daughter sleeping in the passenger seat, stunned-looking from the night shift. We traveled with another driver and, true to my experience in Maine, pulled over a few times to … Continue reading
Small Talk
Last evening, an elderly doctor I was introduced to asked me how I survived childhood. For folks who don’t know me, I’m small — I mean, really small. I’m a smidge over 4’8″. Technically, I’m tall for a dwarf. Only as … Continue reading
This Old Book
Walking with my friend through town, we find a cache of free, reeking-of-basement-mold books — a strange collection of Zen and psychoanalysis and car repair that might have come from my own jammed shelves. I pull out a skinny book … Continue reading
Random February Late Afternoon
With the number of snow days this year, I imagine my daughter will be picking handfuls of peas from my garden when she walks to school in June. The lilac blossoms will hang limply by then, past their sweet prime, … Continue reading
One Large Step
The first tooth my daughter lost she threw into the woods. She had been eating a wild apple in our sugarhouse driveway, and the tooth pulled free into the fruit, frightening her. She spit the mouthful into the forest and … Continue reading
