A New Series: One Minute Reviews of
Books by Vermont Authors
Laura's column "One Minute Reviews" has appeared bi-weekly in Wilmington, Vermont's Deerfield Valley News since 2015. In April 2018, she found that no Vermont periodical consistently reviews all commercially published fiction and non-fiction by Vermont authors, so she started a series to fill that void. Published reviews from that series and some earlier reviews of local authors are listed with links to a scan of the printed copy. Reviews still in queue are listed without links until they appear in print.
The books reviewed in this series are available through Wilmington's Pettee Memorial Library, the Whitingham Free Public Library, and locally owned Bartleby's Books in Wilmington.
Betsy Vereckey, Moving to My Dog’s Hometown: Stories of Everything I Didn’t Know I Wanted. Rootstock Publishing, 2026
During the first year of Betsy Vereckey’s marriage, she and her husband decide they want a puppy. Research into breeders leads them to Susan and Jake, “a quirky middle-aged couple” in Hanover, New Hampshire, who breed Glen of Imaal Terriers, “a scruffy Irish breed that looks like the puppy that might have resulted from a threesome between a lion, a polar bear, and a seal.” The newlyweds drive from New York City to Hanover, buy a puppy, and name him Ronan; he and Betsy soon become attached to each other.
Three unhappy years later, the couple divorces. Betsy gets custody of Ronan, but he’s the only thing she’s happy about. In a narrative voice that miraculously manages to be at once humorous, sardonic and sincere, she chronicles a series of episodes that portray her loss of direction. She hopes to find an orderly future by consulting astrology charts. She attends a Chinatown reading of auras and finds that her electromagnetic field is a huge, dark cloud. At 37, she feels she is running out of time; so she spends $10,000 trying to freeze her eggs. Professionally, she is a ghostwriter, a relatively lucrative job that makes her spend her “entire day trying to sound like someone else.” Before she was divorced, she walked to that job past the gradually rebuilding World Trade Center; when it was completed, she and her husband had a celebratory drink in its top-tower restaurant. Now, the building has become a towering daily reminder of her failed marriage.
One day, as she walks to her hated job, she looks up at the tower and thinks, “How great would it be to never have to see it again…and never have to obsess over client feedback in a Google Doc again?” So she quits her job, leaves New York and moves to Hanover—Ronan’s home town. The move is not [entirely] random. Betsy and Susan have corresponded, on and off, ever since they met over Ronan, and lately Betsy has revealed her unhappiness after the divorce. Susan suggests (and with Susan, we soon learn, “suggestions” have a lot of force) that Betsy and Ronan rent the basement apartment they have recently constructed below the house where they live with their five Glen of Imaal Terriers. “Stay here until you figure out what you want to do.”
The short essays that follow cover select events that occur while Betsy is trying to find her way into a new life. They vary in tone from deliciously comic (Betsy joins Susan and Jake as they spend many evenings watching Jeopardy in a competition to see who can shout out the most correct answers) to poignant (the deaths of Susan’s mother and of one of the terriers both bring up issues of the choices facing the people who love the dying), to descriptive (Betsy’s introduction to gardening makes her realize that New England has made her appreciate the beauty of the seasons). And after a year or so, Betsy meets a man who observes there’s a fly in her drink, an encounter that sets off all the excitements and emotional wanderings astrologer Betsy calls the “cosmic trash” that emerges “when your baggage aligns with someone else’s.”
This is a delightful read. The essays, related mainly by location and excellent character description, allow part time perusal that gradually builds into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If that whole makes the reader want to know more about Glen of Imaal Terriers, so much the better.