Description
Title: Vinegar Hill
Author: A Manette Ansay
ISBN: 9780380730131
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 1998
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: Reissue
Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher : In her remarkable debut novel . . . Manette Ansay writes with startling authority and quiet elegance of one woman’s gradual realization that in order to reenvision her life she must break all the rules. It is 1972 and Ellen Grier finds herself back in the Midwestern hometown she thought she had escaped for good. Worse yet, she and her family have had to move in with her in-laws: narrow-minded, eccentric people who are as tough as the farm lives they have endured. Devout Catholics, they inhabit a world “as rigid, as precise as a church, ” and Ellen struggles to live by their motto: “A place for everything; everything in its place.” But there is no place for Ellen — fresh, funny, bright with passion — in a house filled with the dust of routine and the ritual of prayer, the lingering bitterness of her in-laws’ loveless marriage. She tries to be the model woman everyone expects her to be — teaching at the Catholic school, coaxing her traveling-salesman husband through his increasingly irrational moods, caring for his aging parents — but Ellen’s hopes for her family’s future collide with life in this bizarre household, and she worries over her wryly observant adolescent daughter and her timid young son. Encouraged by her friend Barb, a woman ostracized for being “modern” and “wild, ” Ellen begins to consider her own desires and dreams as well. Surrounded by the family’s obsession with an exacting, angry God and the disquieting ghosts of the past, Ellen searches for a way to satisfy the demands of this rural community and its traditions until, at last, she discovers the family’s darkest secret, one that frees her and changes her life forever.
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