A winning story of frontier up-state New York, near Fort Ann -- in days after the American Revolution when settlers were taking up land grants, and trappers were beginning to feel crowded. Old Man Poet never intended to be a settler, and fought against the strictures of matrimony, fatherhood, and farming --and did poorly at all three. So when fate took a hand, and his home and barn and wife were burned, he turned tail on the children and took to his beloved woods. This is the story of how the ideal of what would have done took hold of young Dan's mind and made him and his sisters into a trio hard to best -- a story of neighborliness, fought stubbornly by proud young Dan, but winning by circuitous ways -- a story of ""Young 'Un"" growing up, taking the weight of responsibility for steering the family fortunes into better paths upon her childish shoulders -- a story of the generosity and the meanness and the humor and the orneriness of frontier folk and frontier ways. Viney found herself suddenly aware that she didn't want to be Dan'l's silent partner all her life -- and that somehow meant more to her than the goal that was in Dan'l's imagination. And she found a way. The story in the telling has much of the poetry and the essential quality of The Yearling. I liked it.