Seven Locks: A Novel
A woman struggles to raise her children and run her small farm, located in the literal and figurative shadows of the pre–Revolutionary War Catskill Mountains. After her lazy husband mysteriously disappears, the unnamed narrator is all but shunned by her suspicious neighbors, who believe she either drove her husband away with her incessant scolding or she killed him and ground his body up for sausage meat. Determined to eke out an existence for her family as war looms in the distance, she faces the daunting task of carving out an independent niche for herself despite the censure of the community. If elements of this story sound a bit familiar, don’t be surprised. Wade has creatively co-opted and reimagined bits of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle to tell the time-honored tale from an entirely different perspective. --Margaret Flanagan