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Product Identifiers

PublisherDownEast Books

ISBN-100892729163

ISBN-139780892729166

eBay Product ID (ePID)99634032

Product Key Features

Book TitleShow Me Good Land

Number of Pages200 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2011

TopicPsychological, Family Life, Crime

GenreFiction

AuthorShonna Milliken Humphrey

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Weight13.8 Oz

Item Length8.9 in

Item Width5.9 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2010-038894

Dewey Edition22

ReviewsThis engrossing portrait of a place is hard to look away from, the way a battle scene or a plane crash can be. With tender insight and a hard wit, Shonna Milliken Humphrey has created characters much like the ones from my own hometown, the ones who cheat and steal and love and strive-whatever is necessary to cobble together a life on the hard land, at the end of the road. Any road, anywhere. -Hannah Holmes, author of The Well-Dressed Ape, From a small airplane, Aroostook County-THE County, as it's known here in Maine-is a patchwork of potato fields and forest stands, pond and farmsteads, also towns strung like cultured pearls along the roads and rivers. Show Me Good Land is like that, too, an intricately plotted and subtly colored quilt of the flummoxed lives of the people down there, where roots go deep and dreams fly high. It's a wonderful cast of deeply drawn characters, all brought together by a murder in a land where that kind of violence is as rare as gold. -Bill Roorbach, author of Big Bend, Temple Stream, and The Smallest Color., The setting of Show Me Good Land may be Aroostook County, Maine, but the rich sadness of Shonna Humphrey's characters, her haunting portrait of a bewildered, isolated community, reminded me powerfully of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. --Richard Russo, Shonna Humphrey possesses that rare thing: a true and utterly distinctive American voice, full of the grit and texture of place, compassion and authenticity. She does not so much tell her story; she inhabits it. Every page feels real. -Joyce Maynard, author of Labor Day, To Die For, and At Home in the World

Dewey Decimal813/.6

SynopsisSet in fictional Fort Angus, Maine, Show Me Good Land tells the story of a small rural town struggling with poverty and decay after decades of prosperity. Loosely linked through a grisly murder, its characters must navigate the ambiguous moral landscape of a waning community. It is a moving, sometimes melancholy, often funny novel about family, community, loss, redemption, and coming home. The pleasure lies in exploring the personalities of the characters, none of whom are all good or all bad, and eventually deciding where the reader's own moral lines are drawn. Not since Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, has a cast of characters been so shocking, beautifully rendered, and ultimately likeable., In the following pages I have endeavoured to tell in a popular way the story of the Norman Conquest, and to give an idea of the principal personages who figured in England at the period when that memorable event took place; and I have endeavoured, I hope not without some degree of success, to treat the subject in a popular and picturesque style, without any sacrifice of historic truth.With a view of rendering the important event which I have attempted to illustrate, more intelligible to the reader, I have commenced by showing how the Normans under Rolfganger forced a settlement in the dominions of Charles the Simple, whilst Alfred the Great was struggling with the Danes in England, and have recounted the events which led to a connexion between the courts of Rouen and Westminster, and to the invasion of England by William the Norman.It has been truly observed that the history of the Conquest is at once so familiar at first sight, that it appears superfluous to multiply details, so difficult to realize on examination, that a writer feels himself under the necessity of investing with importance many particulars previously regarded as uninteresting, and that the defeat at Hastings was not the catastrophe over which the curtain drops to close the Saxon tragedy, but "the first scene in a new act of the continuous drama." I have therefore continued my narrative for many years after the fall of Harold and the building of Battle Abbey, and have traced the Conqueror's career from the coast of Sussex to the banks of the Humber and the borders of the Tweed.For the same reason I have narrated the quarrels which convulsed the Conqueror's own family-have related how son fought against father, and brother against brother-and have indicated the circumstances which, after a fierce war of succession in England, resulted in the peaceful coronation of Henry Plantagenet, and the establishment of that great house whose chiefs were so long the pride of England and the terror of her foes.

LC Classification NumberPS3608.U4745S49 2011