by A. Manette Ansay (1995)
Here are the lives of rural people struggling to make sense of the isolated and often intensely religious worlds in which they live. Marie, a young wife and mother, recalls the effects of a statutory rape trial on her small community. Stuart, a devout teenage boy, dares to rename himself "Start," the only significant thing he has ever done without first consulting God. Widowed Eliza discovers her husband's ghost in the bathroom, flipping through pages of the Popular Mechanics magazines she had thrown out after his death.
Marjorie White Pellegrino
Annie is unhappy that she has to share her grandmother, the mayor, with so many people, but when she helps out during a town emergency, Annie appreciates all that her grandmother does in the community.
DouglasGarman
Mon cher ami, en tete de ces pages, j'ai voulu, pour deux raisons tres fortes et tres precises, inscrire votre nom. D'abord, pour que vous sachiez combien votre nom m'est cher. Ensuite, -je le dis avec un tranquille orgueil, -parce que vous aimerez ce livre. Et ce livre, malgre tous ses defauts, vous l'aimerez, parce que c'est un livre sans hypocrisie, parce que c'est de la vie, et de la vie comme nous la comprenons, vous et moi.
written and
As Becky and her family busily prepare for a traditional country Christmas, she grows more and more curious about the special present Father is making for her.
Jane Rule
AGAINST THE SEASON is a consciously old-fashioned, stylicized [sic] novel about cycles of birth, growth, and death ... An old woman comes to terms with her dead sister while reading her diaries, her pregnant housekeeper teaches her shy grandnephew a little courage; a middle-aged couple yearn to overcome loneliness, an elderly couple court in the face of public ridicule, and Dina Pyros, used furniture dealer and town butch, is courted, public and privately, by Rosemary Hopwood, social worker, nervous, aristocractic and very determined.