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by Beverly Jensen
In 1916, Idella and Avis Hillock live on the edge of a chilly bluff in New Brunswick - a hardscrabble world of potato farms and lobster traps, rough men, hard work, and baffling beauty. From "Gone," the heartbreaking story of their mother's medical crisis in childbirth, to the darkly comic "Wake," which follows the grown siblings' catastrophic efforts to escort their father, "Wild Bill" Hillock's body to his funeral, the stories of Idella and Avis offer a compelling and wry vision of two remarkable women. The vivid cast includes Idella's philandering husband Edward, her bewilderingly difficult mother-in-law- and Avis, whose serial romantic disasters never quell her irrepressible spirit. Jensen's work evokes a time gone by and reads like an instant American classic.
"Readers will be left wondering what else Jensen might have written had her career not been cut short." - Publishers Weekly
"From their rocky beginnings through their father's death and their own old age in 1986, the sisters' tale remains compelling." - Library Journal
"Straightforward yet lyric prose and an eye for the crucial detail bring the Hillocks' world vividly to life." - Kirkus Reviews
"Maybe two or three times in a decade, a book comes along that's so good you want to buttonhole strangers on the street, show it to them, and say: 'Read this! It will fill you up and make you glad you're alive!' The late Beverly Jensen's The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay is exactly that kind of book. . . If you ever loved The Memory Keeper's Daughter or The Secret Life of Bees, you have been waiting for this book and just didn't know it. Idella and Avis, the sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, stole my heart. They'll steal yours, as well. Read this book. And buy a copy for your best friend, because you'll want to keep yours." - Stephen King
"The story of these two sisters, Idella and Avis, travels from Canada to New England, but mostly it travels through their lives and hearts, and it will travel through your heart, as well." - Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge
This information about The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Beverly Jensen earned an MFA in drama from Southern Methodist University. After her death from cancer in 2003 at the age of forty-nine, her story "Wake" was published in the New England Review, included in The Best American Short Stories of 2007, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is survived by her husband, Jay Silverman, and their two children. Since her death, her fiction has been championed by a dedicated group of supporters, including Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates.
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