The Fall of the Year
In his novelsNorthern BordersandA Stranger in the Kingdom, Howard Frank Mosher has displayed a magical command of New England's terrain, not to mention its rustic inhabitants.The Fall of the Yearfinds him at it again, waving his writer's wand over a tiny section of the north woods. His narrator, Frank Bennett, has returned home to Kingdom Common, Vermont, after graduating from college during the late 1950s. Despite the impending construction of a nearby ski resort, this minuscule village remains as bucolic as ever:Truth to tell, few of the three hundred or so Commoners who lived in the village proper had the slightest inclination in downhill skiing anyway. Our principal recreations were still trout fishing and deer hunting, and they were both very good indeed.It's the Commoners--particularly the more eccentric ones--who make up the heart of Mosher's novel. Frank devotes one chapter to the village's grumbling fortuneteller; another to a fiercely entrepreneurial jack-of-all-trades; and a third to a beautiful baker's assistant, with whom he'd clearly like more than a casual, yarn-spinning relationship. But the true personification of the place would have to be Frank's adoptive parent, Father George Lecouer. When this ex-whiskey smuggler turned priest isn't laboring at his 3,000-pageHistory of Kingdom County, he's dispensing advice to the narrator and setting various bits of small-town havoc in motion. Though some of Frank's tales are predictable, most evince the storyteller's gift for consistent surprise--which makes this Kingdom Common saga an uncommonly fine work of fiction.--Rucker Alex--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.