Good Grief

Good Grief PDF Author: Ellen Stimson
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1581573219
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An endless New England vacation becomes a way of life for one woman and her family Ellen Stimson and her husband had such a wonderful time in Vermont that they wondered what living there would really be like. “What if we stayed here . . . forever?” So began the series of adventures and misadventures of Ellen Stimson’s hilarious first book, Mud Season. Now, having settled the family in Vermont’s rich, muddy soil, they are faced with new challenges of raising kids in the paradise of this very small, very rural town. Good Grief tells the tales of the hopes and dreams of parents just trying to do their best—and not always succeeding. Imagine being the mom of the kid who peed on his teacher’s chair . . . On. Purpose. Now imagine the governor asking you about it! Good Grief is all about the inevitable moment right after somebody says, “What next?” Ellen Stimson’s irrepressible optimism and good humor prevail as she, her two husbands, their three kids, and various much-loved pets face down real life, and even death and grieving, with good humor intact. This is life in a state where everyone knows everything, and everything is everybody’s else's business.

Good Grief

Good Grief PDF Author: Ellen Stimson
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1581573219
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
An endless New England vacation becomes a way of life for one woman and her family Ellen Stimson and her husband had such a wonderful time in Vermont that they wondered what living there would really be like. “What if we stayed here . . . forever?” So began the series of adventures and misadventures of Ellen Stimson’s hilarious first book, Mud Season. Now, having settled the family in Vermont’s rich, muddy soil, they are faced with new challenges of raising kids in the paradise of this very small, very rural town. Good Grief tells the tales of the hopes and dreams of parents just trying to do their best—and not always succeeding. Imagine being the mom of the kid who peed on his teacher’s chair . . . On. Purpose. Now imagine the governor asking you about it! Good Grief is all about the inevitable moment right after somebody says, “What next?” Ellen Stimson’s irrepressible optimism and good humor prevail as she, her two husbands, their three kids, and various much-loved pets face down real life, and even death and grieving, with good humor intact. This is life in a state where everyone knows everything, and everything is everybody’s else's business.

Good Grief: Life in a Tiny Vermont Village

Good Grief: Life in a Tiny Vermont Village PDF Author: Ellen Stimson
Publisher: The Countryman Press
ISBN: 1581576420
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
An Endless Vacation Becomes a Way of Life! One vacation changed everything. Ellen Stimson and her husband had such a wonderful time in Vermont that they wondered what living there would really be like. “What if we stayed here . . . forever?” So began the series of adventures and misadventures of Ellen Stimson’s hilarious first book, Mud Season. Now, having settled the family in Vermont’s rich muddy soil, they are faced with new challenges of raising kids in the paradise of this very small, very rural town. Good Grief tells the tales of the hopes and dreams of parents just trying to do their best—and not always succeeding. Imagine being the mom of the kid who peed on his teacher’s chair . . . On. Purpose. Now imagine the governor asking you about it! Good Grief is all about the inevitable moment right after somebody says, “What next?” Ellen Stimson’s irrepressible optimism and good humor prevail as she, her two husbands, their three kids, and various much-loved pets face down real life, and even death and grieving, with good humor intact. This is life in a state where everyone knows everything, and everything is everybody’s else's business.

The Call of the Farm: An Unexpected Year of Getting Dirty, Home Cooking, and Finding Myself

The Call of the Farm: An Unexpected Year of Getting Dirty, Home Cooking, and Finding Myself PDF Author: Rochelle Bilow
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
ISBN: 1615192158
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Honest, self-aware, and wonderfully tender, The Call of the Farm is for anyone who has daydreamed about a simpler life—or fallen too deeply in love. Rochelle Bilow, a classically trained cook and aspiring food writer, was nursing a broken heart and frustrated with her yet-to-take-off career when she set out to write a short profile of a small, sustainable CSA farm in central New York. At most, she expected to come away with a cute city-girl-in-the-country piece. But after just one day of moving hay bales, feeding pigs, and tapping maple sap, she was hooked: The air was fresh, her muscles felt useful, and the smells from the kitchen where the farmhands gathered at day’s end were intoxicating. Add in a sweet but enigmatic young farmer whose soulful gaze meets her own, and The Call of the Farm is set in motion. This enticing memoir charts the unexpected year that unfolds as Rochelle immerses herself in life at the farm. She cooks her way through four seasons of fresh-from-the-earth produce (with such tantalizing results as Blistered Tomato Gratin and Crisped Potato Casserole with Shaved Chives), grapples more than once with the finer points of rendering lard, and begins to feel she has finally found her niche—all while falling hard for that handsome, blue-eyed farmer.

Mud Season: How One Woman's Dream of Moving to Vermont, Raising Children, Chickens and Sheep, and Running the Old Country Store Pretty Much Led to One Calamity After Another

Mud Season: How One Woman's Dream of Moving to Vermont, Raising Children, Chickens and Sheep, and Running the Old Country Store Pretty Much Led to One Calamity After Another PDF Author: Ellen Stimson
Publisher: The Countryman Press
ISBN: 1581576927
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Living the dream of the endless vacation “Anyone who has ever dreamed of leaving the city and taking their lives back to nature (and who hasn't?) will find much to contemplate in this warm and hilarious tale of rural misadventure and small town quirk, even if they have never chased a goat in a bathing suit or called 911 because there were cows in the road. Stimson's voice is endearing: both in its self-deprecation and its rapture, as she sings an only slightly conflicted love song to Vermont.” —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted “Taking a plunge that wimpier sorts (i.e. most of us) only fantasize about, Ellen Stimson and her family packed up their house in St. Louis and threw themselves into a wildly different life in small-town Vermont. Armed with the passion-and haplessness-of wide-eyed newcomers they rescue goats and adopt chickens, do battle with skunks and bats and falling ice, and, most disastrously, buy a black hole of a general store. Through it all they manage to retain their love for their adopted home as well as one another. This is a tale to which all the cliché words absolutely apply: hilarious, heartwarming, rollicking, and, most of all, rich in the real stuff of life.” —Julia Reed, author of But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!

Mud Season

Mud Season PDF Author: Ellen Stimson
Publisher: Center Point
ISBN: 9781628990225
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Originally published: Woodstock, Vermont: The Countryman Press, 2013.

Telling Christina Goodbye

Telling Christina Goodbye PDF Author: Lurlene McDaniel
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
ISBN: 0307433811
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Trisha Thompson and her best friend Christina are having a great senior year. Trisha and her boyfriend, Cody, are making plans to attend Indiana University together in the fall, while Christina has already received a scholarship to the University of Vermont. Everything would be perfect if only Trisha got along with Christina’s controlling boyfriend Tucker, who is trying to convince Christina not to go away for college. But suddenly their lives change one night when Tucker is driving the four home from an away basketball game. When his car hits a patch of black ice and overturns, Tucker walks away with barely a scratch, but Trisha is injured, Cody is in a coma, and Christina is dead. Those left behind must learn that it takes time for their scars—both visible and not—to heal. And they must find the courage to move on with their lives.

The Seas

The Seas PDF Author: Samantha Hunt
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1941040969
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
National Bestseller "The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you’re newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell..." ?Maggie Nelson (from the Introduction) A Most Anticipated Book of Summer at BuzzFeed, NYLON, and more. Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She’s often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid. True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior.The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend. With the inventive brilliance and psychological insight that have earned her international acclaim, Samantha Hunt pulls readers into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.

Good Grief

Good Grief PDF Author: Lolly Winston
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 0759510423
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
A brilliantly funny and heartwarming debut about a young woman who stumbles, then fights to build a new life after the death of her husband. The perfect book for anyone who has ever been heartbroken, lost someone they loved, or eaten too many Oreos. Thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton wants to be a good widow—a graceful, composed, Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, she’s been drowning her sorrows in ice cream and showing up to work in her bunny slippers and bathrobe. Determined to start over, she moves to Ashland, Oregon, where she finds herself in the middle of a darkly madcap adventure involving a 13-year-old pyromaniac and an alarmingly handsome actor who inspires a range of feelings she can’t cope with—yet.

I Know This Much Is True

I Know This Much Is True PDF Author: Wally Lamb
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780060391621
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 884

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Book Description
With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.

Into the Wilderness

Into the Wilderness PDF Author: Deborah Lee Luskin
Publisher: Deborah Lee Luskin
ISBN: 0983484309
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Deborah Lee Luskin's critically acclaimed love story, Into the Wilderness, follows Rose Mayer after she has just buried her second husband and wonders what she's going to do with the rest of her life. The year is 1964, and Rose is no longer a young woman. Reluctantly, she visits her son at his summer place in Vermont, where there are neither sidewalks, Democrats nor other Jews. There is, however, the Marlboro Music Festival. It's there that she meets Percy Mendell, a born and bred Vermonter who has never married, never voted for a Democrat, and never left the state.Both Rose and Percy confront habits of a lifetime, habits that interfere with their undeniable attraction to one another. Rose confronts her religious ignorance and spiritual beliefs, while Percy is forced to question his life-long political faith. All this takes place in the small Vermont town of Orton, (pop. 290). Into the Wilderness is a tale of the outsider infiltrating a new community and how all parties negotiate their differences. It's also a tale of rural Vermont at mid-century, a time when the major technological advance was the Interstate highway, a road-building project that changed rural America as much as the information highway is changing the world today.Readers routinely say, "I didn't want it to end but I couldn't put it down." Into The Wilderness has been hailed as "a fiercely intelligent love story" and "a perfectly gratifying read.""Into the Wilderness is a poignant description of a specific placebut it is also a timeless story of human fulfillment," says Frank Bryan of UVM. "Luskin's heroine Rose Mayer is an honest to God miracle. Rarely has a fictional creation come to seem so perfectly real to me, and never have I cheered out loud as a character in a novel worked her way through the last stages of grief," adds author Philip Baruth.Deborah Lee Luskin often writes about Vermont, where she has lived since 1984. She is a commentator for Vermont Public Radio, a free-lance journalist, and a Visiting Scholar for the Vermont Humanities. Into The Wilderness is her first published novel.