When I posted yesterday, I should have mentioned Michelle Hoover’s book, The Quickening.  I think it is literary fiction at its best.  I could feel the wind and the snow and get a sense of the life of a farm family.  The characters a finely drawn, and the language is lovely.  Read more about it here.

I was interested in it on several levels. Beside the language and the writing, the inspiration came from a journal from Hoover’s grandmother.  I was interested in the translation from journal to novel, partly because my wife Beverly’s grandmother accomplished the same sort of translation of a great-great grandmother’s journal about Cape Cod and whaling in a wonderful book, The Cut of Her Jib.  See more about that book here.