Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | SCD FICTION QUI 7 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | SCD FICTION QUI 7 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A novel about family and the secrets that we keep--a young woman learning to love and leave home and realizing that, maybe, she never quite left. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Still Life with Bread Crumbs and Rise and Shine .
This story begins in the 1960s, and explores how Mimi Miller comes of age, over and over again.
As a young girl in Miller's Valley, an ordinary farming town that may be facing its final days, Mimi is observing adults, selling corn, growing up and changing, and watching the world around her change, too.
As the years go by, the unthinkable starts to seem inevitable. Anna Quindlen's novel takes us through the changing eras of Mimi and her family, as secrets are revealed, and the heartbreaks of growing up and falling in love with the wrong man are overcome.
A deeply moving, inspiring story of a young woman learning to love and leave, the place and family from which she comes.
Author Notes
Author Anna Quindlen was born in Philadelphia on July 8, 1953. She graduated from Barnard in 1974 and serves on their Board of Trustees.
Quindlen worked as a reporter for the New York Post and the New York Times and wrote columns for the Times. She won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary before devoting herself to writing fiction.
She has written both adult fiction (including Object Lessons, Black and Blue and One True Thing, which was made into a motion picture starring Meryl Streep) and children's fiction (Happily Ever After and The Tree That Came to Stay). Her title Alternate Side made the bestseller list in 2018.
Currently, she is a columnist at Newsweek. Her title Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake made The New York Times Best Seller list for 2012. (Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Quindlen's latest novel, following Still Life with Breadcrumbs, is a moving exploration of family and notions of home. Mimi Miller recounts her life beginning in the 1960s in Miller's Valley, a small Pennsylvania town where her family has been firmly rooted for generations. Government officials warn that a flood could drown the family farm, and Mimi observes her community's reactions while trying to reconcile her own ambitions with her loyalty to home. Her father refuses to relocate, and seeing his stubbornness, Mimi begins to understand her mother's own unrealized dreams. She also wonders about her reclusive aunt, who lives in a small house on their property and never ventures outside. She watches as her brother, Tommy, tries to escape a feeling of stagnancy by enlisting in the military, only to find himself more trapped than before. Meanwhile, she forges her own escapes into school, romance, and sex. Though the pacing is somewhat uneven, Quindlen's prose is crisp and her insights resonant. This coming-of-age story is driven as much by the fully realized characters as it is by the astute ideas about progress and place. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Growing up in the valley that bears her family name, Mimi Miller learned early on that there is a dance of determination and delicacy in the best and worst of relationships. The one between her mother and aunt was fraught with recriminations, yet sustained by loyalty. The one between her brother, Tommy, and the world at large went from open and trusting to closed and criminal after his stint in Vietnam. The friendships Mimi herself had with childhood pal Donald and teenage love Steven went from love to lust and back again. But perhaps no connection was more important than that of the Miller family to the land that had been theirs for generations, as it came under threat of annihilation by a government-mandated flooding project. As she matures from precocious youngster to purposeful young woman, Mimi comes to terms with life as it should be versus life as it is. This is vintage Quindlen (Still Life with Bread Crumbs, 2014), a compelling family tale rich in recognizable characters, resplendent storytelling, and reflective observations. It is also an affectionate and appreciative portrait of a disappearing way of life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling author and popular columnist Quindlen is a go-to novelist for popular fiction fans; an all-fronts promotional campaign will marshal enthusiastic interest.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHAT DOES HOME REALLY MEAN? Is it the people around you who make a place familiar and loved, or is it the tie to land that's been in your family for generations? Anna Quindlen's mesmerizing new novel investigates both, seen through the eyes of the indelible Mimi Miller, who narrates the story of her life - and of the assault to the people and to the land she loves - from her 1960s girlhood to the present day. The book begins with the summer Mimi is 11 and everything around her is about to change in Miller's Valley. She lives with her parents, her older brothers - rakish Tommy and practical Eddie - and her Aunt Ruth, her mother's sister, who harbors a terrible secret, and who never leaves the confines of her small house behind Mimi's. The farm has been in their family for almost 200 years, and Mimi can't imagine life beyond it. The land has always been wet, it seems to Mimi. There's always a sump pump running in Mimi's house, and when it storms, mud comes right up to the front porch. But then, the government steps in, deciding to flood "6,400 acres of old family farms and small ramshackle homes and turn it into a reservoir by using the dam to divert the river," transforming corn fields into strip malls, drowning the valley under water, along with a way of life that has been perpetuating itself for generations. They'll buy up homes and resettle everyone, insisting that new is so much better than old. At first the town stubbornly resists, except for Mimi's mother, who everyone expects will fix things, but instead, she cryptically announces, "Let the water cover the whole damn place." But Mimi is desperate to stay. She has no idea what else there is to want, or where else she could possibly live or who else she could possibly be other than a girl on a farm with her family. Her father, too, is tied to the land he loves, and Ruth balks at even stepping outside her house. But as the river is allowed in, dampening the ground, loosening ties, it seems to drown people little by little, forcing secrets to float up to the surface and change things in ways you might never expect. What do you do when your way of life is gone? Who do you become? And what do you now consider home? Quindlen makes her characters so richly alive, so believable, that it's impossible not to feel every doubt and dream they harbor, or share every tragedy that befalls them. Mimi founders, watching as those she counts on leave her, as the land begins to fall away. Her mother is mysteriously bitter toward Ruth, and closemouthed about why. Eddie grows into an efficient man, more like a "friendly visitor" than a brother, who sees and seizes opportunity, becoming an engineer and building new homes for the displaced, as if the future were like a bright, shiny penny. Tommy, the sibling Mimi adores, gets by working odd jobs, car repair, and later selling drugs and going off to war and prison, a man who just tragically never found his place. But what's Mimi's place? "I knew there was a world outside," she says. "I just had a hard time imagining it." When she gets highest honors in school, her mother insists, "This is your road to something better than this." And then to Mimi's astonishment, she gets a full scholarship to medical school. She doesn't want to leave, but finally, slowly, she begins to move toward her future, to gather ambition and purpose, and to truly see beyond the confines of her life. If there is a weak link at all, it's Donald, a childhood friend of Mimi's who moves away, but promises to come back to her. Somehow, though, he doesn't lodge on the page the way the other characters do. He's steady, and without interesting corners. If he's so devoted to Mimi, why hasn't he made more effort to visit more often? Why hasn't he written more than brief letters, signed with "sincerely"? What is there about him, except for his stolidity in a rapidly changing world, that endears him to Mimi? Still, the novel is overwhelmingly moving. The town is so detailed that we can hear the grain waving in the wind, "the cattle complaining like a bunch of old men with tobacco throats." We experience how the land changes through the "foggy mist of summer" to "the dry-ice mist of winter." And of course, the haunting descriptions of the floodwaters, channeling in, "slowly at first, and then faster, harder, so that on the evening of the third day the people in town said they felt a faint tremor and thought Miller's Valley was having its first earthquake." The ending fast-forwards like a kind of majestic tide, carrying all these lives we've come to deeply care for into middle age and beyond, as people marry, birth children, move on and, yes, die. Family bonds are restructured, and secrets (one so startling, you never see it coming) are revealed that either wedge people apart or bind them together. But Quindlen also allows her characters mystery - and some of what's unknown stays unknown, which burnishes her story with a kind of haunting grace and truthfulness. Here, in this novel, where so much is about what vanishes, there is also a deep beating heart, of what also stays.
Kirkus Review
In her eighth novel, a coming-of-age story set in rural Pennsylvania, Quindlen (Still Life with Bread Crumbs, 2014, etc.) focuses on a young woman buffeted by upheavals in her personal life and a threat to the farmland her family has owned for generations. Mimi Miller is 11 when we meet her, a farm girl who sells corn by the side of the road and, at night, eavesdrops on her parents' conversations by way of a heating vent. Her mother is a nurse, strong-willed and unsentimental, her father a genial man who farms and fixes things. Mimi has two older brothers, the stalwart Edward and the wastrel Tommy, as well as an agoraphobic aunt who lives in another house on the Millers' property. Government officials are lobbying the Millers and their neighbors to relocate so their flood-prone area can be turned into a reservoir. Meanwhile, the charming but feckless Tommy enlists in the Marines, then goes seriously astray when he returns home. Mimi, by contrast, excels at schoolworkscience in particularand finds an ardent, if not entirely appropriate, suitor. Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and former reporter, writes with great empathy, making you care deeply about her characters. Her language is simple but true: "Sometimes there are things that you've rehearsed so many times, thought about so often, that when they happen it's like they already happened a long long time ago," Mimi says of her father's passing. Perhaps there is a bit too much summing up in the book's final chapter, but it still manages to be quite stirring, in an Our Town sort of way. There are familiar elements in this storythe troubled brother, the eccentric aunt, a discovery that hints at a forbidden relationshipbut they are synthesized in a fresh way in this keenly observed, quietly powerful novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In the 1960s, the residents of Miller's -Valley, a small Pennsylvania town that has seen more than its share of flooding, are being pressured by government officials to accept eminent domain, move out, and watch their town fill with water for a fancy new recreation area. Mimi Miller is a bright, independent teenager with a gift for science who's read the geologists' reports and understands the dark lies hidden beneath the promises of modern living. Her fracturing, strong-minded family is torn. Brother Tom, once a likable high school troublemaker, has returned from Vietnam a ruined man. Her Aunt Ruth, trapped by her own secrets, hasn't left the small house on the Miller property for years. Mimi's parents are divided; her nurse mother accepts the inevitable, while her farmer father can't imagine life anywhere else. Yet it's Mimi who holds them all together at no small cost to her own future. VERDICT In this crisply told story of progress, loss, love, deception, loyalty, and grace, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Quindlen once again captures her readers' attention from first page to last. [See Prepub Alert, 10/12/15.]-Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 I grew up to the sound of my parents talking in the kitchen on my mother's nights off, and the sound of the sump pump when it rained. Sometimes, all these years later, I wake up in the middle of the night and think I hear one or the other, the faint pounding of the throttle or the murmur of those two low voices. On a wet night the best I could ever make out was a little muttering even if my mother and father were talking loud. If you properly maintain it, and my father did, a sump pump makes a throaty chug-a-chug noise, sort of like a train without the whistle. My brother Tommy always said he liked the sound, but I think it was because it meant he could sneak out at night without anyone hearing. My mother didn't mind it because her shift work meant she was hardly ever at home at night, and so tired when she got home that nothing kept her awake. My room was in the back corner of the house, right over where the sump pump sat on the cement basement floor two stories below. From the window in my room you could see the path up to the back end of the property and the lights through the trees of my aunt Ruth's house. She kept at least one light on all night long. I liked looking out and seeing that light in the darkness, something that had always been there, that I could count on. It was real quiet most of the time around our house at night, so quiet that sometimes I could tell what Aunt Ruth was watching on television because I could hear the theme song of The Dick Van Dyke Show. There was a heating vent right behind the head of my bed, and if you followed it down it stopped at the heating vent behind the kitchen table before it ended up at the old cast-iron furnace in the basement. When I was five I thought my room was haunted because just as I was dropping off to sleep I would hear a moaning sound underneath my bed. Years later my brother Eddie told me that Tommy had put his mouth to the vent and made the noise and Eddie made him stop when he caught him, and all of that made sense, including Eddie saying he hadn't mentioned any of it to our parents. The thing was, listening to my parents through that vent was like a bad radio broadcast, one of those where you've got a song on you really like but it's from fifty miles away and it drifts in and out and you have to fill in the gaps by singing along. I was good at filling in the gaps when my parents talked, and I probably heard a lot I shouldn't have. If it had been LaRhonda listening, the whole town would have known, too. You could close that heating vent with a little chain at one corner, and I always did when LaRhonda slept over. But the rest of the time I paid attention to whatever I managed to hear. She's got cancer in that breast, my mother might say. That'll be hard on Bernie, my father would say. Bernie? It'll be hard on her, is who it'll be hard on. From what I hear Bernie has plenty of female companionship. Gossip, my father would say. Then silence, and I would fall asleep. Or, That baby is going right into the state hospital, no questions asked, my mother might say. That's a sad thing, my father would say. Sadder to keep it at home, my mother would say. Guess so, my father would say. She was always sure of things. He almost never was, except maybe about the government people and their plans for Miller's Valley. Over the years there was a lot of talk about that at night in the kitchen. Talked to Bob Anderson yesterday, my mother might say. Got no business with a real estate agent, my father replied. Asking for you, my mother said. Fine right where I am, my father said. Clattering pans in the sink. Tap running. Why I even bother, my mother said. "Meems, you up?" Tommy whispered, pushing open the door. When he wanted to he could move through the house like a ghost, even when he was drunk. Maybe especially when he was drunk. "How come you're home?" I said, sitting up against the headboard. Not listening to one more word on the subject, said my father. "Oh, man, not again," said Tommy. He sat down on the edge of my bed and canted his head toward the vent so that a piece of hair fell down on his forehead. It was confusing, having a good-looking brother. I tried not to think of him that way, but LaRhonda wouldn't shut up about it. "What are they talking about?" I said. "Who's Bob Anderson?" "Did the water department guy stop by here today?" "Who?" "Did some guy in a Chevy sedan come by to see Pop?" "There's somebody who came by and had some kind of business card from the state. Donald says he talked to his grandfather, too. He says he went to the Langers' house and some other places." "That's what they're talking about, then. The damn dam." "Mr. Langer says that all the time," I said. "Yeah, that's the problem for sure. The old guys say that when they built the dam, when they were all kids, there was a big fight about it. They figure now they put it in the wrong place, or the water's in the wrong place, or something. They want to flood the whole valley out." And both of us looked out toward the light in Ruth's window. "What about us?" I said. I knew about the dam. It was named after President Roosevelt, but the one with the mustache and the eyeglasses, not the one with the Scottie dog and the wife with the big teeth. We'd gone to the dam on a field trip. The guide told us it was made out of concrete and was for flood control, which didn't make sense because we had flooding in the valley all the time. A lot of the kids were bored by the description of cubic feet and gallons, but we all perked right up when the guide said four workers had died building the dam. Our teacher said she wasn't sure we needed to know that. It was probably hard for people to believe, but we didn't pay that much attention to the river, even though it was so big and so close and had a big strong arm that ran through the center of the valley. They called that Miller's Creek because years ago it had been just a narrow little run of water, but once the dam went in it turned into something much bigger than that. I'd spent a lot of time around creeks when I was younger, looking for minnows and crayfish, and that was no creek. It was mainly out-of-town people who went to the river. The current was too strong for swimming, and it was nicer at Pride's Beach, which was a stretch of trucked-in sand on one side of the lake south of town. The fishing was better in the streams in the valley, although you had to be pretty good at fly casting to get around the overhanging branches. There was a loud grinding sound through the vent, two wooden chairs pushed against the surface of my mother's chapped linoleum. "Oh, man," Tommy whispered. "You got matches?" "Why would I have matches?" Tommy sighed. "I had plenty of matches when I was your age." "Shut up!" I said, and "shhh," Tommy said. My parents passed by on the way to their room. "I can't ever keep track of where he is or what he's doing," my mother said, and in the moonlight I saw Tom waggle his eyebrows. Both of us knew our parents were talking about him. Ever since he'd finished high school my brother had been at a loose end. At least that's what my aunt Ruth called it, a loose end. It's not like school had been so great, either: unlike Eddie, who was class valedictorian, Tommy had always been a rotten student. Maybe he had one of those problems they didn't figure out until later, which I see now all the time, a learning disability or dyslexia or something. He had handwriting so bad that there was no one who could read it. Even he couldn't make it out sometimes. The only tests in high school where he had a fighting chance were true and false, although even there he occasionally made an F that looked too much like a T. He'd squeaked by, but at the time it didn't feel like it mattered much; when he strode across the gym and hoisted his diploma, the cheers were louder than they'd been at the end of the class president's speech. But then he was out in the world and found it hard to make a living with nothing but his easy ways. He would have been great at politics; instead he'd worked in a car repair place. But he lost his license for six months after he got popped on Main Street late one night speeding, with open beer cans in the car and a girl throwing up out the window; the police officer who stopped him was the father of the girl, and when he looked in the driver's side window it was easy to see that his daughter wasn't wearing any pants. Tommy'd met the girl because her uncle owned the car repair place, so he was twice cursed. A lot of what Tommy got into seemed like a story someone was telling, except that it was true. He worked around the farm, too, but he made my father crazy. "He's a careless person," my father would say, not even checking whether Tommy was around to hear him. "I ask him to move some hay and two days later I find a pitchfork rusting by the rain barrel." "Tell the old man I went to get gas for the tractors," Tommy'd say to me, and then he'd disappear for a couple of hours. "You seen your brother?" my father would say, and I'd open my mouth and he'd say, "Don't tell me he's out getting gas again because both those tractors are full." I didn't have a face for lying. "Just stand behind me," LaRhonda always said when we had to lie to her mother. "You got any money?" Tom whispered after he'd heard my mother go from the bathroom back into her bedroom. "No," I said, but he kept on staring at me, and finally I said, "Seven bucks." "I'll pay you back," Tommy said. "You never pay me back." He shoved the bills in his pocket, pushed back the shock of hair on his forehead, slid around my door and was gone. I never even heard a car start up. The sump pump was thumping again. That always made it harder to hear Tommy's getaway. Chapter 2 I'd made that seven dollars selling corn. For an eleven-year-old girl it felt like real money. I sat behind a card table by the road on late summer days, sometimes alone, usually with LaRhonda and Donald. It was boring, but it was something to do, although pretty much every day was like the day before. A car stopped, and a woman waved out the window. "How much?" she asked. Her hair was set in pin curls. She had a scarf over them, but the row right around her face wasn't covered and the bobby pins sparked in the harsh August light. "A nickel an ear," I said. "Thirteen in a dozen." "I think they're cheaper down the road," the woman said, rubbing at her head. I don't know why pin curls make your head itch, but they do. "Then go down the road," LaRhonda said under her breath. She had a mouth on her almost from the time she learned to talk. Donald carried the paper bag to the car. "Thank you, ma'am," he said. The woman handed him a dollar and said, "Keep the change." I gave him a dime from the can, gave LaRhonda another, and put twenty cents in the breast pocket of my plaid cotton shirt. The shirt had been Tommy's. I got a lot of Tommy and Eddie's clothes, which was made even worse because they were so much older than I was and so the clothes weren't just boys' clothes, they weren't even fashionable boys' clothes. That summer Donald wore a kind of collarless shirt with three buttons in front that I'd never seen before and that I was sure was fashionable, although that was about the last thing Donald cared about. His mother lived in a halfway decent-size city. His father was a shadowy figure. Donald spent a lot of time in Miller's Valley. Visiting, he always called it, but he did it so often and so long that it practically counted as living there. I always felt a little lonesome, the times when he went back home, if that's what it was. "Dump that poor boy on his grandparents whenever she cares to," I'd heard my mother say through the heating vent. "Her carrying on." I hoped her carrying on wasn't what it sounded like. LaRhonda was wearing white patent leather shoes with a strap and a very slight heel with her pink shorts and shirt. Her white feet were rubbed red all around, her heels swaddled in Band-Aids over blisters. Most days she was limping by nightfall and her mother would want to soak her feet in Epsom salts and she would say, "Like somebody's grandmother?" and limp off to bed. LaRhonda's mother had been wheedled into buying those shoes for her Easter outfit, and LaRhonda took them off only when she put on her flowered shorty pajamas. I wore Tommy's old pajamas, too. The worst thing was, all the boys' old clothes fit because I was narrow and sharp-shouldered, more or less built like a boy. I was a straight person, legs, nose, hair, everything long and narrow, up and down. I more or less always would be. When I got older the way I looked came into fashion, but by that time I was past caring. But when I was a kid wearing my brothers' clothes the way I looked was a trial, as my aunt Ruth called things that bothered her. "I won't listen to complaining about what's on your back, Mary Margaret," my mother said. "There's too many fences need mending around here." I remember first finding the expression "mending fences" in a book and being confused because I couldn't think of it as anything but literal. Cows get antsy, or randy, or just stumble sideways, and a section of fence comes tumbling down, and they trudge out onto the road, and you have to fix the fence fast or more cows will follow, and maybe get hit by a truck driven by someone not paying attention. Happens all the time. Excerpted from Miller's Valley by Anna Quindlen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.