What is happening in Vermont now that new people are moving in and the old agrarian ways are dying? THE SIMPLE LIFE is a deeply engaging rural tragedy about well-meaning ordinary people whose lives tangle with each other in a destructive way. The only true innocents are the team of oxen whose own story is one of the central threads. In 1991, Isabel Rawlings, a middle-aged suburbanite, recently divorced, moves to Severance, Vermont, to try to live a simple, rural life. She gets romantically involved with Leroy LaFourniere, a real estate developer and small-town hustler, and she makes friends with an old ox teamster, Sonny Trumbley, and his great-granddaughter, Alison LePage. After a tragic farm accident, everything unravels, and Isabel realizes that the simple life isn t as simple as she had fantasized. Starting over is the theme of this engrossing tale, according to AARP the Magazine, but Isabel finds, in words of Vermont Life Magazine, that Vermont, like other rural places, is changing and that not everyone who lives in the Green Mountains is a saint. The editor of Vermont Life found in THE SIMPLE LIFE overtones of James Agee s A DEATH IN THE FAMILY. Isabel plunges incautiously into her new world but discovers that life, unlike dreams, is never simple but rather a winding, treacherous road that can be very short or very long, but is never smooth or painless. As the book unfolds and the story quickens, wrote Roger Sale, retired English professor and long-time book reviewer for many national publications, the sentences, without changing their ways and means, gain an uncluttered, crystal clear, dignified stature as the doors of Porter s characters lives open and close decisively.

About the Author

Since graduating from St. John s College, Ruth Porter has spent her life writing and reading in rural Vermont. She has lived on a subsistence farm for thirty years where she raised four children and most of their food. She was born in New York and grew up in Ohio. Porter, Maxwell Perkins granddaughter, has completed a one-man show about Perkins and has collaborated with her aunt, Bertha Frothingham, Maxwell Perkins oldest daughter, to edit Perkins personal letters, FATHER TO DAUGHTER. She is working on her third novel about Vermont.

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