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
Tag Archives: #grateful
Summer, Age 14
14 years ago yesterday, I sat in my friend’s kitchen nursing my newborn while she labored to bring into the world her daughter. Her mother-in-law served me a bowl of chicken soup from an enormous pot she had cooked. Returning … Continue reading
Edge of the Earth Might Be Here…
…. or not. There’s nothing quite like visiting your very early childhood territory with your youngest child, who’s now 14 and partly worldly as heck and partly a jigsaw-puzzle-loving kid. An unrequited desire of mine had been to visit somewhere or someone … Continue reading
My Torrid Love Affair…
… with T. C. Boyle continues — although his most recent book is not my favorite. I first linked up with Boyle as a high school student when I found Budding Prospects, then World’s End. I was reading East Is East as a college … Continue reading
Love Of
For no other reason except sheer pleasure, magnetic poetry reemerged in our lives…. And sometimes one sentence is enough.
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
Simple Sweetness
Eleven years ago, my family had a member injured in a woods accident, involving a nighttime search and rescue, and myself driving to the ER at two in the morning with my two-year-old in the back of my old Volvo. … Continue reading
Fat Garden
A monarch butterfly followed me to the post office. Since the store closed last year, the village is quiet — only a garage and the post office remain open, and the post office keeps merely afternoon hours. Save for the … Continue reading
