Emaciated and longing for death (one of very few slips into melodrama), Aimee moves to the hunting shack on the edge of her family's land, where she experiences a kind of love in the arms of another exile. Amy can't forgive her mother for forcing her to give up the twins to whom she gives birth. But her dalliance with feckless William Tanning-on a bolt of cloth on the mill's floor-leaves her pregnant. In her own eyes, Aimee strayed from the righteous path her mother laid down the day she touched her younger brother sexually in the hayloft. At 15, the defiant Aimee flees her family's New Hampshire farm to work in the mills of Lowell, Mass., where she proves adept with a loom but unwilling to resist the charms of the mill's mechanic. Her ailing mother lives just a few miles through the woods, but the distance, for Aimee, is nearly impassable-and her story tells us why. Smart, wounded but not defeated, 38-year-old Aimee raises rabbits and chickens in a tiny hunting shack on the edge of a bog in 19th-century New Hampshire. The plainly eloquent voice of narrator Aimee Slater draws readers into this strong and affecting first novel.
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