Hidden View, Brett Ann Stanciu
Hidden View, Brett Ann Stanciu
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Hidden View

Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Narrator: Suzanne d'Corsey

Unabridged: 7 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/01/2020


Synopsis

Hidden View is a short novel set in the Vermont agrarian landscape, a story of Fern Hartshorn, unworldly, and unexpectedly pregnant at nineteen. Marrying an older man she barely knows, Fern begins her adult life on an isolated and hardscrabble farm named Hidden View.  Shortly after the birth of her daughter, the future of the farm is jeopardized by a family dispute over ownership between her husband and his brother, Lucien.  Unwillingly, Fern is torn between the two brothers, bound to Hal by marriage, child, and a modicum of economic stability, and to Lucien by companionship and a deepening desire.   This novel embodies the geography of Vermont.  The mountainous landscape suffuses the novel with its mark upon characters through spring mud, the lavish profusion of summer, winter's bitter starkness, and its constant, ineffable beauty.  Just as the landscape seasonally transforms, the characters of Hidden View reveal themselves through action and dialogue.  Thus, in a snowstorm, while a young child pleads for a toasted cheese sandwich, Fern struggles with her deteriorating marriage and rising desire for Lucien, struggling at the uniquely human place of how, and why, to choose her course.  Lyrically, the language and metaphors arise from the setting, complementing the novel's integrity.    Hidden View's characters are vivid, written without disdain or cliché, distinctive to the setting of this Vermont farm and its particular family fracas.  The reader wants to know what happens to these people in their troubled lives.  The ending, while lucid, casts the reader back to the vagaries of life.  Fern writes, "I was so young then, so ripely full of blood and milk and desire and work.  I was so young I believed my heart might freeze and thaw and blossom.  How little I knew that cycle would repeat over and over and over, that our life, while brief and mortal, is also long and tedious and bound to the constraints of our weak flesh."  Therein lies the tension of Hidden View:  the corporal versus the spiritual world, and that in-between of human activity and choice.  On a small farm in Vermont, that story unfolds.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sara on June 12, 2019

This book is charged with raw emotion. The story of Fern setting out on her own in life relates not only her personal journey but depicts the hardships of rural farm life. Everyone will find a situation and emotion they can relate to. This is not a “poor me” novel, but conveys more of the struggles......more

Goodreads review by Lory on May 27, 2016

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. If you're tired of seeing the same books from the same big-name publishers hyped everywhere, and would like to discover some quality under-the-radar fiction that not everyone knows about, I have got something for you. Hidden View by Brett Ann Stanc......more

Goodreads review by Heidi on December 03, 2015

This debut novel is beautifully rendered and I read it cover-to-cover in a few days. Stanciu has a poet's eye and it's remarkable how intricately she describes this landscape I am so familiar with. I can't wait until her next novel is published!......more

Goodreads review by Roxanne on February 01, 2016

This is a Goodreads review. Another book I did review that did not show up. Great book.......more

Goodreads review by Joyce on January 09, 2016

An extraordinary debut novel. I hear she's working on a second book, but in the meantime, I would cheerfully read her shopping list.......more