We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Stimson's children will be lucky in having these stories of their lives to pass down through the generations the rest of us only get to visit for a while, but it's a visit to remember. Either way, it’s an enjoyable journey for readers. Maybe the author’s clan doesn't have more mishaps and amusing anecdotes than the average family, and it's simply her engaging writing style that shapes their experiences into these well-balanced stories.

He's coming with Hannah to meet the family over brunch mom also has an elaborate dinner party planned later in the day before the brunch, mom inadvertently sets the dining room table on fire. For example: Daughter Hannah has a new boyfriend he's a decade older than she is, and he’s Republican, while the family is liberal.

It's difficult to tell, in a satisfying way, whether Stimson's family has an unusually high number of stories that read like heartwarming and amusing family comedy films. Stimson, her husband and their three children are still living in rural Vermont, dealing with all of the changes that come as children become teenagers and marriages find their patterns. More proof arrives in her second book, which largely picks up where the first one left off. It makes for a good article, but the truth is different this sort of family exists now just as much in “the good old days.” That truth also makes for a good book, as readers of Stimson’s Mud Season (2013) can attest. In magazine articles about the state of American families and their homes, writers will often wistfully long for a time when things were simpler-even while acknowledging that, technically, there was no such time-when families were tightly knit in the bonds they shared. The continuing adventures of a family in Vermont.

Mud Season by Ellen Stimson