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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: poetry
Balmy Days (Yet)
This autumn gives us day after day of warmth, and while the days’ length dwindles, the light oddly expands as the branches shake down their leaves, opening up the landscape around our house and on the distant mountains, too. The … Continue reading
October 1
I’ve seen fall foliage seasons where walking down our road was like wandering through a 3-D painting – so stunningly gorgeous the colors were nearly unbelievable. When my daughter was one, we spent a morning along our nearly empty road, … Continue reading
A Single, Superlative Sentence
Like this cold September (what? covering gardens already?), reading Knausgaard is both exasperating and mesmerizing. Does he really live in a house with small children and can write about minutiae? Reading at the kitchen table, my bare toes rub over the sugary … Continue reading
Midsummer Marveling
In these long July evenings, the children stay up late around the firepit, roasting ridiculously large marshmallows, burning the sugary outsides while the innards remain in their bizarre, uncooked marshmallow state. As the dew descends, I gather swimsuits, a sandal … Continue reading
The Target
Like many parents, I’m sure, much of my life seems a scramble between work and, honestly, everything else; then yesterday afternoon I picked up my daughter at camp, ate BBQ and lettuce so fresh it had grains of sand on … Continue reading
Oh, Joy!
Coltsfoot sighting today: a whole wide hillside of the gorgeous tiny blossoms. This Good Friday emanates the radiance of these persistent blossoms. In Montpelier, everyone is smiling. I buy too much Easter candy, chatting with the proprietor at Delish about … Continue reading
