"This heartbreakingly honest and authentic fiction will make you weep
over, laugh at, and finally cheer for, mothers and daughters, sons and
fathers, lovers and losers, and the human race in general. Half Wild
is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best."--Howard
Frank Mosher, author of The Great Northern Express and Northern
Borders
Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur's formidable
debut give voice to the dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of
Vermonters--adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers,
disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between
civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their
loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they
call home--golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses
and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the
imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul.
In "Creek Dippers," a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has
trapped her eccentric mother. In "God's Country," an elderly woman is
unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she
did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls
ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in "The Women
Where I'm From."
With striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur
effortlessly renders characters--men and women, young and old--cleaved
to the fierce and beautiful land that has defined them.
