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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: serenity
Summer Growth
I wake this morning listening to rain, thinking about shears I left in the garden — such a little worry. Dry the tool off and put it back on the shelf. My younger daughter is home again — two weeks … Continue reading
Gifts, Flowers, Vegetables
I’m in a meeting negotiating options to spend a gift to my library when I leave the table to check my laptop for a program’s fees in my email. I see my daughter, off from work that afternoon, has sent … Continue reading
August First
August 1st dawns quietly — the songbirds winding down, the dew slipping in silently overnight — save for the cats who mew in hunger. Yet another summer day, a small kind of miracle that will disappear, a day promising to … Continue reading
Last Sunday in this July
Early Sunday morning, the cat wakes me by biting my toes. Get up! Get up! Camping on a lake, my younger daughter wrote us news of the loons calling crazily all night long. I think of her listening to those ghostly, … Continue reading
Train Trip
Four summers ago, my family planned an Amtrak journey from Vermont to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in what would be the longest family trip of our girls’ childhood. That summer trip evolved into an illustration of that Robert Burns’ line … 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
Antidote
When my teenage daughter recently spied a rattlesnake, we talked about the antidote to snakebite. Antidote: literally, a dose of a substance that’s given against a poison or illness. Antidote is an aggressive word, a noun rearing up on its hind … Continue reading
