The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay: Full of Heart

Beverly Jensen's The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay is a poignant, old-fashioned tale of two sisters, Idella and Avis, who grow up on a windswept, rocky bay in New Brunswick, and then move to Maine and Boston in early adulthood.  The book is a novel but each chapter could be a stand-alone short story.  The novel follows the more serious and dutiful Idella and the fiery and irreverent Avis through the course of their lives, starting with scenes from their childhood in 1916.  In the first chapter, "Gone," the girls lose their mother due to a mistake on the part of the country doctor who had given her the wrong pills for her pregnancy.  Their father Bill is left to figure out how to raise two girls amidst the toil of farm life.  Both Idella and Avis eventually leave the farm to forge independent lives.  The reader is so endeared by the two women that one finds oneself rooting for them, even as life still presents them with many challenges and hardships.  Throughout their lives, they are never quite dealt the hand we hope for them, but there is just enough humor and hope to make this book uplifting.  This is a book about loss and resilience, family and the landscapes that shape our lives.  It was an easy and absorbing read - a really good novel.  Beverly Jensen died of pancreatic cancer in 2003, and this is her only published work.

The Mountain Lion: A Coming of Age Classic

Jean Stafford, an award-winning short story writer and novelist,  wrote The Mountain Lion in 1947.  Stafford's work has been published in The New Yorker and she won a Pulitzer Prize for her collected short stories.  Yet, her work has been under the radar for many years.  The Mountain Lion was published again by the New York Review Books in 2010, and as a result, Stafford is once again garnering the attention her writing so clearly deserves.

The Mountain Lion tells the story of Ralph and Molly, siblings who grow up in a stodgy, genteel suburb with their prim and proper older sisters and mother.  But these two are not interested in the confines and routines of their daily life.  When they have the opportunity to start spending summers with their Uncle Claude who lives a rugged, wilder life on a ranch in Colorado, they are thrilled at the adventures that they believe await them.  As Ralph and Molly enter adolescence their strong bond becomes threatened as their innocence gives way to brooding and their individual searches for happiness, which seem to be elusive as the mountain lion that lives in the woods near the ranch.  Stafford has written a brilliant bildungsroman, complete with wit, sharpness, memorable characters, and a shocking ending.  So consider curling up with The Mountain Lion and a hot chocolate on this wintry day!

Bookseller by day, Writer by Night: Introducing Deborah Willis

Vanishing and Other Stories is a great debut from young Canadian author Deborah Willis.  Her short stories are written in simple, beautiful language and explore intimate relationships among friends, between lovers, and within families.  The two stand-out stories for me were "sky theatre," a story about a beautiful teenage girl who seems invincible but then falls from grace when an accident occurs, and a more ordinary girl who shares a pivotal moment with her.  The other stand-out story is "the separation," a story about two sisters with hippie parents ("raised on lentils, brown rice, Neil Young, and solstice celebrations") who decide to separate.  This was a very funny ("It was one thing to smoke weed that the neighbours grew.  But to support the big tobacco companies was out of the question."), tender, brilliantly written story.  In an addendum included in this print version, Willis writes an account of her double life as a bookseller and writer, and describes the moment when she sold the first copy of her book.  Her humility, as evidenced by all of her story titles written in lower case and her apparent wonderment at finding her writing in print, makes her a winsome author of whom I expect more great work to come.