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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: photography
Sign of Spring, Hardwick, VT #9
Come what may — more April snowflakes, cold rain, glittery frost in the weeds against the barn — in our corner of Vermont we’ve stepped across the line to spring. Yesterday, in a chilly rain, my daughters and I peered … Continue reading
Sign of Spring, Hardwick, VT, #8
Raising teenagers so often feels in your face hard — sometimes breathtakingly hilarious, sometimes just not. I remind myself of running rivers. Not far from us, Buffalo Mountain’s watershed drains into Cooper Brook, which runs around the log yard and by the … Continue reading
Barre, VT, Courthouse
A retired Barre police officer sat beside me while I was waiting outside a courtroom in the Washington County Criminal Court, and he mentioned he thought he knew my former husband. He suggested that clearly I didn’t know my former … Continue reading
A $5 Rainbow-Bright Kickball
My cheerful kids returned yesterday with a bright pink blow-up beach ball they found on a back road. The older daughter, driving, had pulled over, so the 12-year-old and her friend ran back along the ice-rutted road for the garish … Continue reading
Icy Reminiscences
This February reminds me, yet again, of how rapidly our world changes: nearly 70º degrees yesterday, with my daughter reading on the back porch and eating a turkey sandwich, to this nearly colorless day, where the younger daughter and I … Continue reading
Teaser of Spring
Home early from work, I walked to the post office with my daughter, in what Vermonters know as sugaring weather. Streams ran down hillside streets. Birds sang in bare-branched treetops. This is the first winter I have lived in town … Continue reading
Tales from Library Land
When I was vacuuming tiny gold stars from the library’s rug yesterday, in the hour when the tired after school kids were getting picked up and before the adult readers appeared, I noticed the carpet, hard-worn when I arrived as … Continue reading
