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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: #motherhood
Rules for Novelists — Rules for Living
In Vermont, we’ve skipped from the Ides of November to the middle of January — just like that — and none of us have even eaten any Thanksgiving turkey. The 13-year-old, on her second snow day this week, calculates how … Continue reading
My Long-Ago Mentor
The children’s librarian in the town where I grew up — Goffstown, New Hampshire — not only offered me first dibs on brand-new books (I began reading Judy Blume’s Deenie while walking home), she also came to my wedding. Every summer, … 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
Symphony of Our Small World
In high school, hidden in the upstairs of my parents’ barn, I read Russian literature — The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace — I read about life behind the Iron Curtain, Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn. Late last night, the cats and I read … Continue reading
Postcard from Vermont, July
An elderly woman and I stand in the library’s open door, sheltered by the overhang, watching rain move in, great billows of fine drops rushing across the field. Summer people visit the library on these steamy afternoons, in a their … Continue reading
Define Our Life Thus
Walking home through the cemetery fields, I noticed how brown the grass is — pretty much withered. That’s a particularly beautiful walk, high enough up above the village that I can see how Hardwick lies in a narrow valley along … Continue reading
