Return in Kind
When Letty Hendrickson dies, she leaves an enormous bequest to Mather College – but to her husband Joel, she leaves 150 acres in Vermont that he didn’t know she owned. Joel goes to Vermont to sell the property, and discovers not a ski-country investment but the Ward Place: an old farm with a family graveyard and a house that is mysteriously clean and well-kept, in spite of having been empty since 1959. As Joel tries to solve the mystery of the bequest, he is assisted by three women. The first is Helena Woodhouse, who had a 45 year platonic friendship with Letty’s guardian Nathaniel Brantford, the iconic president of Mather College from 1940 to 1977. The second is Charlotte (Charlie) Reynolds, a beautiful teenager whose eager research reveals the long-kept secrets of the Ward Place. And finally, first-hand understanding of the Vermont closed to outsiders is provided by Eleanor Randall Klimowski, a scholar who has been fired from her teaching job because of her increasing deafness , and who is now cleaning houses to support herself. What emerges is a tale of romance, misplaced pride, and unendurable sorrow, as Joel struggles to discover whether his legacy was a reproach, an apology, or a twisted but genuine act of love.
"Laura C. Stevenson's wonderful RETURN IN KIND shows us the depth and spirit of geography: how generations, living and dead, can sing from a single patch of ground. Her main character, Joel Hendrickson, has lost his wife and is left land from her family in the stark beauty of Vermont; it is an inheritance which, he soon sees, offers answers to mysteries about his wife, Letty, and about his own soul. A vivid cast of characters, living and dead--the wise Eleanor, the stunning young Charlie, the ghost of Nathaniel--surround him in this place of discovery, darkness, rebirth; Stevenson stitches their lives together--their meaning for one another--brilliantly. The work is a rarity, steering clear of popular strategies and offering unrelenting honesty. This is a powerful read--a highly intelligent, moving, and humane novel."Joseph Hurka author of Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father (winner of the Pushcart Editors' Book Award) and the novel, Before.
Return in Kind is a stunning, highly original novel with a cast of gifted characters who confront a haunted past that threatens to consume them. By interweaving family journals and letters into a seamless contemporary landscape of the wayward college, the mountaintop mansion and the struggling farm, Stevenson creates a lyrical work that reads as if a Shakespearean tale were magically transformed by the northern foothills of New England. A small masterpiece, Return in Kind is crafted with both a deft regional hand and a broad cultural arc as it boldly confronts the eternal conflict between the yearning of the human heart and the implacable march of time.Jonathan Edward, author of Yankee Doodle