Fell in love with Mosher's work when looking for something to illuminate my drives through Vermont on the way to the shore. Bought this in an independent bookstore where the owner knew the author. Reality and fiction overlapped nicely. Characters and places in this book are simply delightful and real. ( )

I loved this book. Typically, with a book of short stories, I am left feeling incomplete with the end of each story. Not so with this one by Mr Mosher. It is a wonderful collection of stories with fantastic character development.

My thanks to netgalley and St Martins Press for this advanced readers copy. ( )

As I finished the last story in this marvelous collection, it was with a sad and heavy heart. Another amazing author we will not hear from again, a man who created the mythic landscape of Kingdom County in Vermont. The Kinnesons, who have inhabited this place for generations, on both sides of the poverty line, both sides of the law. They are fascinating characters whom I have come to cherish.

The stories in this collection go back and forth in time, in them we are able to revisit some of the characters I have come to love. There is humor, betrayal, much fishing, and descriptions of nature. They go from heartbreaking to humorous and somewhere in between. The people and place come alive in all his books and of course in these stories as well. They truly earn the five stars I have given them.

Luckily for me, I started this series relatively late so I still have his early books to go back and read. They are in my mind comparable to Hardy's Wessex tales, the late Kent Haruf and his Colorado towns and Wendel Barry's terrific novels. They are novels, stories to cherish, as the people and places in them come alive and capture the reader, with some wonderful, smart prose and depth of characters. Another author I will surely miss.

ARC from Netgalley. ( )

Howard Frank Mosher's last book is a collection of short stories, all set in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom in a fictitious small town. The stories are interconnected because they center on the Kinneson Family over a period of a couple of centuries, during which family members are the focus of this community. As they interact with each other and their neighbors, we get a glimpse of the rural life Mosher loved so much. Whether newspaper editor, judge, psychiatrist, author, preacher, farmer, or homemaker, the characters exemplify the funny and poignant day-to-day situations behind any crossroads, yet they are larger-than life because of Mosher's affection for them and lovely writing. ( )

I received a ARC from Goodreads, and based on the writer's reviews I expected more from this book. It was well written, but I don't like the style of the book. There were chapters that were descriptions of different characters' lives in this small town, and then you never heard anymore about them. I am not sure if this would have been better as a set of short stories that were more developed, or if it was just thrown together because it was his last book. I just don't like this type of writing. ( )