Vermont Book Reviews: Short Takes on Five New Reads

Seven Days writers can’t possibly read, much less review, all the books that arrive in a steady stream by post, email and, in one memorable case, a shrewdness of apes. So this monthly feature is our way of introducing you to a handful of books by Vermont authors. To do that, we contextualize each book just a little and quote a single representative sentence from, yes, page 32.

Black Days

Jackson Ellis, Green Writers Press, 204 pages. $19.95

The acid in my stomach bubbled up into the back of my throat.

Biblical sadboi Job has nothing on Daniel Fassett, a divorced factory worker in the fictional Vermont town of Granbury. On Christmas Eve 1992, Fassett’s car skids off the road and plunges into the icy Mad River. The accident leaves him in a coma for four months — and thwarts his Florida Keys retirement dreams.

Faced with the prospect of living out his days across the street from his ex-wife, Fassett does what any reasonable person would do: He enlists the help of a local doctor to freeze himself for the winter in his backyard sugar shack. When he wakes up, he discovers that the media has caught on to his hibernation experiment, and his tribulations multiply.

Black Days, Burlington author Jackson Ellis’ second novel, is both a thriller and an unexpectedly moving portrait of small-town Vermont life. When reporters descend upon Granbury to track down Fassett, the post office puts up a sign announcing: “No Directions to the Hibernation House.” And Ellis renders Fassett with a genuine tenderness that makes up for the occasional clumsy line of dialogue. Fassett’s unshakable, commonsense morality will keep you rooting for him to the very last page.

— Chelsea Edgar

Let’s Go, Coco!

Coco Fox, Harper Alley, 236 pages. $24.99.

Are you okay??

I know of no one who would voluntarily travel back in time to middle school, that life chapter of raging hormones, awkward crushes, poisonous cliques and zits. This is where readers find Coco, the young doppelgänger of White River Junction cartoonist Coco Fox and the likable title character in Fox’s debut middle-grade graphic novel.

Fox, a Center for Cartoon Studies alum and occasional Seven Days contributor, conveys the angst and triumphs of a young person struggling to build confidence and understand herself and those around her.

Deep in the pubescent stew, Coco dreads the departure of her best friend, whose family is moving away. Anyone around age 11 or who was once 11 — i.e., everyone — will feel for Coco as Fox depicts her: in a school hallway surrounded by licking flames taunting, “You’re alone. You’re alone. You’re alone.”

Coco does gradually make new friends — thanks, in part, to the counsel of her older brother. When he gets nervous, he confides, “I count down from five. When I get to one, I HAVE to do the thing I’m scared to do.”

That’s sound advice for navigating any stage of life.

— Melissa Pasanen

After the Fall

Ellen Parent, Fitzroy Books, 266 pages. $18.95.

I didn’t say it, but I knew Jacob knew something about me, something about my mom.

It’s not much, but June has little else to guide her. Ever since a barn fire six years earlier scarred her body and stole her memory, the 15-year-old spends her days dreaming of finding the mother she now only remembers in fragments. But her hardscrabble existence in the Republic, a postapocalyptic Vermont poisoned generations earlier by war and climate change, offers few avenues to salvation — that is, until a sinister circus comes to town.

After the Fall, the debut novel by Ellen Parent, is a cleverly crafted page-turner about a teenager’s quest for answers. As June sets off for New Rutland with Jacob, a rogue lawman hunted by the corrupt Green Mountain Boys, she’s forced to confront a painful possibility: that her mother’s disappearance from her life wasn’t accidental.

Given that so many postapocalyptic tales portray Vermont as an idyllic sanctuary, it’s a novel twist to see the state depicted instead as a dark and hostile wilderness populated by superstitious and illiterate Luddites. Eden it is not.

— Ken Picard

The Rest of Your Life Soundtrack

Benjamin Roesch, Deep Hearts YA, 358 pages. $19.99.

Way down there with the shipwrecks and the anglerfish … is the rest of the story.

Readers first met Rainey Cobb in Benjamin Roesch’s 2022 debut novel, Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze. Its sequel, The Rest of Your Life Soundtrack, is set two years later. Rainey is 17, and she finally has what she wanted. The Cobb Family Band has parked their RV, and her life on the road as a touring, homeschooled musician is in the rearview mirror. She goes to an ordinary school like an ordinary girl — who fronts an indie band. And catches the eye of a major record label.

Signing a contract would pay off her sick father’s mounting medical debt but crush his wish that she go to college first. It’s an offer that might not come around again, but one with so many flip sides.

The record producers want her to take out her nose ring and sing their “radio-ready” pop tunes. Are they right? Or are they the bloodsucking leeches her brother says they are? And what would they think if they knew “the guy” who inspired a love song she sang for them was actually a girl with iridescent green eyes?

— Mary Ann Lickteig

How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World

Ethan Tapper, Broadleaf Books, 229 pages. $28.99.

I wish not for a perfect relationship with this forest but for a good one…

Ethan Tapper is a professional forester (and tattooed punk rocker) who writes about his woodlot with the tenderness of a parent. In 2017, he purchased 175 acres on a hillside in Bolton. The woodlot had been “high-graded” by loggers — all the valuable trees removed, the land claimed by invasive Japanese barberry and thousands of beech seedlings doomed to die of beech bark disease.

How to Love a Forest makes a convincing case, in language at once lyrical and scientific, for well-considered human intervention to restore such woodlands. Tapper chronicles the pain as well as the satisfaction he feels as he treats invasives with herbicides and cuts down swaths of trees to make way for a more diverse, healthy forest.

While he sometimes irritatingly repeats his deeply felt reactions to the world, the book should be required reading for lovers of trees and landowners who want to understand their woods — and want them to thrive.

— Candace Page

This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2024.