Novel Gift Choices That Won’t Be Returned to Sender

By Amy Lilly

Fiction lovers planning on gifting copies of Lorrie Moore’s or Hilary Mantel’s latest for the holidays would do well to look closer to home: Vermont boasts a slew of talented women novelists. Here are five new works of fiction that appeared in 2009, all by experienced authors. Delve into the world of dairy farming or small-town Vermont life; plow through a suspense novel or linger over a family saga. There’s something for everyone.

Eugenie Doyle’s excellent young-adult novel, According to Kit, is set on a Vermont dairy farm and vividly invokes the feel of working one. Doyle and her husband have run The Last Resort Farm in Monkton since 1985. (Of the tongue-in-cheek name, she says wryly, “It was definitely not a resort, but it was the destination we wanted to arrive at.”) The farmer and mother of three became a writer only after they sold the cows – they now produce organic berries and vegetables – but dairy farms are the setting for both her debut YA novel, the critically acclaimed Stray Voltage, and her latest.

According to Kit takes place over the winter of Katherine Snow’s fifteenth year, when a classroom knifing episode prompts her mother to pull her for homeschooling. An aspiring ballet dancer who helps her parents with farm chores, Kit thinks her mother is being overprotective but acquiesces because of the extra dance classes she’s offered in return. The problem is that Ursula, her beloved dance teacher at the local college, is battling multiple sclerosis and looking for a substitute. And it’s soon apparent that her mother, who seems to use chores as a defense against sadness, is too busy for homeschooling, leaving Kit to essentially self-educate.

Luckily, the teenager has already learned discipline from a life of farm work. “Like everyone living with cows, I know the meaning of every day. My first show calf was called Every Day, E.D. for short,” she declares in her drolly confidential voice as the novel’s narrator. Kit applies that same discipline to dance – even more so when Ursula’s handsome but married substitute Luis takes over the class. When Luis decides “Kityana” should audition for a Montreal dance academy, her mother says no, of course. But when has “The White Tornado” ever understood her?

Perhaps unusually, this young-adult book features a girl interested in language: Kit writes poems, is intrigued by a line in James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” and can observe that a dance teacher is “kind of vapid” and the class is “sucky” in one breath. Broaching sexual awakening and mother-daughter tensions at once, the finely written According to Kit will appeal as much to adults as their teenage daughters.

Though she was born in the U.S., Julia Alvarez of Weybridge spent her first ten years in the Dominican Republic. The experience ignited her interest in the Latina immigrant experience as well as her best-known novels, In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Her latest, Return to Sender, is meant to help middle-schoolers understand the plight of undocumented farm workers – a quiet but crucial source of labor on many Vermont farms.

Sixth-grader Tyler Paquette’s world is upended when his grandfather dies and his father is seriously injured in a tractor accident, leaving the family farm and its 200 cows with two fewer workers. But hired hands are hard to come by and usually reluctant to work seven days a week, Tyler’s parents explain to him, so they’ve hired three Mexican brothers and are housing them out in the trailer. The older one has brought his three daughters.

Mari, the eldest daughter, is in Tyler’s grade and already knows English: her family moved to North Carolina when she was four because they couldn’t earn enough from the coffee and corn they grew in Chiapas even to buy the next year’s seed. To ease the loneliness of missing her mother, who recrossed the border for a funeral nearly a year ago and hasn’t been heard from since, Mari writes letters to her that she never mails – and to the U.S. president, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and her father once he is taken away, too. (Alvarez took her title from Homeland Security’s Operation Return to Sender, a series of raids the agency’s immigration arm conducted over three weeks in 2006 to round up and deport illegal aliens.)

The novel alternates between the children’s points of view. Tyler learns to challenge his own assumed equation between “illegal” and “wrong”; Mari’s letters narrate the sometimes horrific events that befall the Mexican family, who live in constant fear of separation. Alvarez’ sympathies are loud and clear, but criticism that she pushes her agenda too forcefully is misdirected: gradeschoolers are less likely than reviewers to care about nuance and will likely be surprised to learn that children their own age live daily with the feeling of being hunted.

Once a Vermonter, always a Vermonter? T. (Tammy) Greenwood grew up in Lyndonville and went to the University of Vermont. Though she now lives and teaches creative writing in Washington, D.C., her third novel, Two Rivers, is set back in Vermont.

Two Rivers is the tiny fictional town in northern Vermont – “just a speck of dust on a speck of dust” – where Harper Montgomery grew up. The young widower lives with his 12-year-old daughter Shelly above the bowling alley and works at the train station. It’s 1980 and Vermont is still very, very white. So, when a train from the deep South crashes on its way through, Harper is startled to learn that one pregnant, black, teenaged passenger named Maggie Jones was bound precisely for Two Rivers. Did she ask to stay with Harper because he was the first person she saw after the wreck? Or, as Harper fears, does she know about the harrowing moment in his past, the murder of a black man in 1968 in which, it’s hinted, he participated?

Despite his fragmented memories of that event, Harper hardly seems like a murderer, even less a racist. He adores Two Rivers because that’s where he fell in love – at exactly Shelly’s age – with his classmate and neighbor Betsy Parker. Much of the novel is their love story, told in Harper’s unassuming, heartbroken voice: he was widowed at 22, the same day his daughter was born and that man, with skin “the color of blackberries,” slid into the two rivers. Now there’s a sassy teen interrupting his home life and resurrecting all the pain of his past.

Greenwood isn’t especially convincing in her creation of a male protagonist, but her portraits of Harper’s and Betsy’s mothers, who feel trapped playing 1950s housewives, are unforgettable. Harper’s mother is a would-be concert pianist; Betsy’s tells her daughter flatly, “I died the day I met your father.” And it’s refreshing to read a Vermont-set novel that indulges neither in idealizing nor debunking the state: there is a Green Mountain Ku Klux Klan here, but it’s subordinate to the personal stories of Harper and his great love, Betsy. Greenwood has created a very real set of lives in Two Rivers, and for readers who look for such things, she has even provided a happy resolution to all that longing.

Dismantled, the latest suspense novel from Jennifer McMahon of Barre, opens with a man hanging himself after receiving a postcard from Vermont with a moose on the front and a cryptic code from his past on the back. As in McMahon’s Promise Not to Tell and Island of Lost Girls, the scene of horror launches a story in which the recent past comes back to haunt. And a little girl living in rural Vermont is again the innocent catalyst.

Nine-year-old Emma DeForge, searching for ways to reunite her estranged parents, discovers they and two friends formed a subversive society called the Compassionate Dismantlers the summer after college. What she doesn’t know is that the gang’s pranks eventually led to the ringleader Suz’s death by drowning. Emma’s parents are already haunted by the part they played in that death ten years ago; their imaginative daughter ingenuously prompts them to think that Suz has returned as an actual ghost. And because of the suicide, who turns out to be a Dismantler’s former boyfriend, a private investigator is now headed their way.

McMahon is a sympathetic channeler, herself, of little girls’ minds: Emma’s anxiety over her parents’ marriage manifests in OCD-like symptoms and an invisible friend. “The truly horrible things take time,” Emma says presciently, thinking of cancer and global warming but just as effectively summing up these 423 pages. Yet the suspense of this New York Times-reviewed novel comes as much from the resurfacing of past horrors as from the question of how, or whether, this family will finally pull together.

Dedicated DIYer Ruth Porter of Adamant just self-published her second novel, Ordinary Magic. She and her husband created their own publishing company, Bar Nothing Books, to ensure that her debut novel, The Simple Life, met her artistic specifications. The new one has a similarly quiet beauty: Porter’s own photographs, of icicled eaves and snowy work horses, form a silent introduction to the novel and grace each chapter page, and the paper stock is luxurious. The whole effect renders the Kindle and its kin irrelevant.

Ordinary Magic is an extended-family saga set in 1977. George and his older brother Cal grew up on the family farm, but George left for the nearby, suggestively named town of Severance to become a lawyer while Cal stayed on. Cal is now a gruff old Vermonter who can smell snow coming and peppers his comments with such colloquialisms as “goin downstreet” – meaning, leaving the farm to go anywhere. When he gets shot through the foot during deer-hunting season, the semi-estranged brothers and their families reconnect in ways as various and tangled as the dark tree branches in the painting Porter chose for her cover.

What aids that process is that George and his wife Laurie’s younger daughter Nora has suddenly come home from her single life in Boston without explanation. Nora is in fact trying to keep her pregnancy a secret, and she finds solace in escaping regularly to Uncle Cal’s. But everyone else seems to have private struggles, too: George is an alcoholic in denial; Nora’s sister Lena juggles two small children and an aloof husband who’s been sleeping with “a friend”; Cal and his wife Ursela’s son Conrad wants to make it on his own as a logger but finds himself becoming mired in debt.

Such a summary makes the book sound depressing, but nothing could be further from the truth. Porter’s meticulous descriptions of the emotional fluctuations behind family members’ conversations, sentence by sentence, make for absorbing character studies with a ring of truth. Sometimes the detail overwhelms the forward drive of the story – there is something to be said for that intermediary in traditional publishing, the ruthless editor – but Ordinary Magic ends up creating a world unto itself that seems as familiar as the one downstreet.