Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Excerpt from The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Readalikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik

The View from Mount Joy

A Novel

by Lorna Landvik
  • Critics' Consensus (6):
  • Readers' Rating (24):
  • First Published:
  • Sep 4, 2007, 368 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Sep 2008, 384 pages
  • Rate this book

About this Book

Print Excerpt


“Well, honey, just pull the shade,” advised my mother when I told her how I couldn’t sleep past dawn in that room.

“As long as you’re getting up so early, why don’t you go down to Haugland’s?” said my aunt Beth, refilling my coffee cup. (She had assumed without asking that I liked coffee, and to my surprise, I found I did.) “I know they’re hiring down there.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, heaping a spoonful of jam on my toast. My aunt had a pantry full of fancy stuff she ordered from specialty catalogs—cylinders of German cookies, imported tins of fish, French pâtés, Swedish candies, and jars of fancy English curds and jams that emptied a lot faster now that we were living with her. But that was the cool thing—well, one of the cool things—about my aunt Beth: she never made me or my mother feel like we were slumming. To her we were guests she couldn’t believe it was her good fortune to host. I knew she wanted me to work so I’d get out of the house—but in a good way.

“It’s the best way to meet people,” she said. “Haugland’s is right by the lake, and it’s swarming with kids in the summer.”

Excerpted from The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik Copyright © 2007 by Lorna Landvik. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant – it tends to get worse.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.