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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: #Vermontwinter
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
Reprieve
A sunstruck afternoon in February — I opened the windows and aired out the house. The kids jumped off the back deck, ate potato chips, planned building projects we needed to start right away. A trustee signed off on an email … Continue reading
February 14
Ten years ago, a friend drove to my house in a snowstorm, and while we talked and talked, drank tea and knitted, so much snow fell that, when she went out to clear her car, we weren’t entirely sure where … Continue reading
Imagination
My brother is standing on a ladder shoveling off our back porch roof when a sheet of snow from the house roof creaks loose and cascades over him. With my daughter’s help, he empties little chunks of ice and powdery … Continue reading
Random February Late Afternoon
With the number of snow days this year, I imagine my daughter will be picking handfuls of peas from my garden when she walks to school in June. The lilac blossoms will hang limply by then, past their sweet prime, … Continue reading
