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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
Tag Archives: family life
Ocean Waters at 80 Degrees?
The other night, I drove home in my fossil-fuel burning Toyota, thinking about the library program I’d just attend where a meteorologist kept returning to our “weird weather.” Standing in the back of the Woodbury Town Hall, a righteous old … Continue reading
Little Bits
A child gave me a tiny quartz pebble. Thinking the pebble must have caused some injury to the child’s bare foot, I asked why I had been given the small thing. The child said one sentence: I found it, and … Continue reading
Stranger’s Gift
A friend stops by the library on my shift and offers hand-me-downs from her coworker I’ve never met. I lift pastel cotton t-shirts, a linen skirt, an embroidered sleeveless blouse: summer things that whisper to me of sunnier days, bare … Continue reading
A Whale’s Heartbeat
In these subzero nights, I’ve abandoned my room of windows on the top floor and started sleeping in my daughter’s lower bunk bed, in her room cozily located over the wood stove. Upstairs, my older daughter’s room is just across … Continue reading
Easy Snow
Driving the neighbor girl home tonight, in the dark descended already at five, the headlights illuminated the pristine snow at the roadside; in the first real snowfall of the season, winter has returned with all its familiarity. The truth is, … Continue reading
Blackberries in All Their Heavenly Glory
I naturally think of the world in terms of metaphors, and blackberry season is a thread that’s wound all through my adult life. Twenty years ago, we moved into our house – essentially a hunting camp then – on a … Continue reading
New Growth
The maple tree before my house was seeded in this ragged lawn before I lived here, and it has grown steadily over these years. This beauty is likely much older than I’ve ever given her credit for. And yet here … Continue reading
