Dimensions
160 x 230 x 29mm
With echoes of 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' and 'The Liars' Club', this searing memoir tells the true story of a childhood burned in memory not only because it was tragic but because it was magical, too. Set on the rugged coast of Maine at a time when the hippy revolution of the '60s spawned the romantic dream of back-to-the land subsistence farming and communal living, this book introduces a superb young writer whose moving quest for the truth is authentic and heartbreaking.
With subtle insight and an ear for the sensual rhythms of nature, Coleman tells the story of her parents, Eliot and Sue -- a handsome, idealistic young couple from proper New England families who leave behind the trappings and expectations of their blue-blood existence to forge a self-sustaining life in Maine. Disciples of Scott and Helen Nearing ('Living the Good Life'), champions of the back to the land movement, the Colemans lay down $2,000 for sixty rocky, unyielding acres, build a cabin for $680 more, and set to work with only the crudest tools, the strength of their own hands, and the determination to create a utopia in which to raise their family and live a life in partnership with nature.
Sue bears three beautiful girls -- Melissa and her sisters Heidi and Clara -- and together the Colemans build upon their purist vision. They eat what they grow, live a life of simple abundance, and create a community that draws fellow seekers, students, and even a reporter from The Wall Street Journal who visits the farm to tell the family's unusual story. But the pursuit of a grand vision comes at a price. The winters are unforgiving and relentless, the isolation unnerving, and the young apprentices who travel from nearby colleges to farm the land introduce temptation and despair into the Coleman's marriage. And then, one summer day when Melissa is seven, three-year-old Heidi wanders off into the humid afternoon, disappearing into the black water of the irrigation pond built to sustain their crops. An angelic daughter has drowned, another has survived. What really happened at the edge of those waters and who, if anyone, is to blame?
What follows is the stuff of all-too-human frailty -- a father's infidelities, a mother's breakdown, a house on fire -- and ultimately the survival of the tragedy's other victim, young Melissa, in the end left deserted on the farm with only the apprentices to look after her, haunted by the need to uncover the truth of her sister's death and pull from the wreckage the beauty of a dream unfulfilled.
