Publisher: Copeland and Day Publication date: 1896 Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Anthologies Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.
This is a beautifully written collection of short stories about a small town in Quebec. The author is good at creating the atmosphere of this late 19th village.
This was a very mixed bag for me and I feel like it would be for most readers since the stories drastically differ in tone and even genre. I loved a handful of them, but also found a lot of them quite boring so as a whole, this was pretty "meh" for me.
I really thought I’d hate this book, or at least grind my teeth at it the way I’ve been grinding my way through all of this nineteenth century settler lit, but this little story cycle is actually weirdly welcoming and intimate. The machinations and workings of this small town are like nothing so much as they are a family dinner, complete with dramatic cousin and nostalgic grandfather and gossipy aunt.
Not what I was expecting at all. Some of the stories contained some humour, some were rather sad, a few were actually spooky(!)--kinda in "Turn of the Screw" territory. My favourite was the last story "Coquelicot", which wasn't in the original collection. Tracy Ware's afterword put things in perspective. Seven and a half stars. Blog post to come.