'Down the Plains'

Praise for the first installment of the memoirs from Annie Proulx speaks to the richness of the stories.

"Rhea Cote Robbins' Wednesday's Child is beautiful stuff, a defiant and poignant memoir that transcends the personal. It is an important book not only for its immediate content, for the experience of life within its covers, but because it gives us a glimpse of the almost unmined Golconda of literary source material in Franco-American lives."--E. Annie Proulx

'down the Plains' extends the mining for gold and shares the wealth with its readers.

Other praise: Wednesday's Child is a dark, dream-like meditation on fragility and survival, of the body from cancer and of the Franco-American community from its inheritance of paroissial piety, social marginality, and relentless poverty. If your roots are in that community, there is much to recognize and confirm; if not, there is much to learn and remember. --Clark Blaise

Against the more familiar observations of the small-town lifer and the urban refugee, Rhea Cote Robbins' syncopations stood out, at once unique and connected to a vibrant and hardscrabble culture. This is a sensuous recollection made urgent by a pending medical diagnosis, and the result is an energetic, poignant, and revelatory memoir. ...Wednesday's Child is astir in every sentence.--Sven Birkerts