I read and enjoyed North Woods, so I was keen to read this one (I listened to it in the end).
Here’s the blurb …
A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind—a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”
The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous— local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.
Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
This is a fabulous novel. We follow this family, and their new quirky community, through a year of ordinary living. Through the ups and downs of ordinary life – who is looking after the children? doing the grocery shopping? dealing with the dog? earning money?, etc. Miles is a great character and through him we hear the stories of many varied people.
The writing is beautiful, finally a well-written, non-traumatic plot.
A review.
