The Idea Farm's Blog

Caren Beilin's novel  Revenge of the Scapegoat , winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award for fiction, is both comical and tragic.  Revenge is marked by repetition, with an ending that mirrors its beginning. And the substance for its action is the restoration of objects from the protagonist's past that she hoped would never return. The Vermont Book Award, given out annually, "shines a light" on a book and focuses readers' awareness on work they may have otherwise missed. Iris, an adjunct college writing teacher in Philadelphia, thinks of herself the family scapegoat. When she was in her teens, she received two letters from her father that she saw as encapsulating his hatred for her. Now 36, she's left all that behind — until one day both letters reappear in a UPS package from her father. While Dad says he was decluttering the family home, Iris sees the letters as if they were a message from the Unabomber. She depicts them as "things that had torn through me...

  A sweet love story about the twilight years. If Haruf (who died November 30, 2014 at age 71) hadn't titled his previous book Benediction (2013), that might have been perfect for this one. It's a slim novel of short chapters, and it would seem to bring the cycle of books about small-town Holt, Colorado, to a close. This isn't a dark night of the soul but one filled with hope and with second chances. Here's how it opens: "And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters." Addie is 70, a widow, and she was close with Louis' late wife. She and Louis don't really know each other that well, other than as nodding acquaintances, but she has a novel proposition: she wants him to sleep with her. Not to have sexual relations, but just to have someone with whom she can talk and share and make it through the night. He appreciates the risk she's taken in making the request, and he agrees, though on their first night he's filled wit...