WINTER KEPT US WARM

A novel about love and yearning in small-town Vermont.

“Blood is blood,” one character darkly intones in Nolan’s taut, evocative novel, and this phrase haunts the events of the story that unfolds in Branlee Village, in Vermont’s Caledonia County in the mid-20th century. Branlee is a tiny place, centered on a town meeting hall, a post office, and the Branlee Country Store (“It smelled like creosote and strong coffee from the outside and, every morning, it smelled like bacon and eggs and strong coffee from the inside”) and surrounded by small-hold farms. The store is owned and run by Bunny Farrow, who narrates the tale from a point many years in the future. Bunny married Stephen Hart when she was young, but after he was killed in World War II, she chose not to remarry and instead established a romantic relationship with a woman named Nicole in Montreal. During Bunny’s many visits to the city, she and Nicole are slightly freer to show affection in public that they would be in Bunny’s hometown. As the story goes on, readers also meet two young cousins from Branlee: shy, bookish Rebecca and pretty Diane, who relishes the attention of men at the Leroux Roller Rink and its attached dance hall. After Rebecca is seduced by loutish James Letourneau (who radiates a “greasy, self-satisfied malevolence”) and dies after giving birth to a son, Henri, in 1956, Bunny defiantly insists that she raise the baby herself. That’s when James notes that blood is blood and that someday he’ll collect his offspring. After that day comes, Bunny spends the rest of the novel worrying about Henri from a distance.

“Do you know the suspended, tingling fear you feel after a flash of lightening [sic] rends the heavens in a summer’s storm?” Bunny asks at one point. “You know a roll of thunder will follow in one explosive, earth-shattering instant.” This same sense of foreboding hangs over Nolan’s setting—a small town that’s “the kind of place a girl moves away from, not the other way around.” Throughout, Nolan effectively evokes a gritty, genuine Vermont (not the picture-postcard version that “the tourism folks like to sell”), and his novel’s portrait of how Bunny’s six years of mothering little Henri fills her with joy is so touching that readers will likely wish it were longer. James is a one-dimensional, monstrous villain, but Bunny is well-developed and complicated, as is the depiction of her life as a lesbian in 1950s Vermont and Canada. As a character, she anchors the book well, and the author wisely has the reader share her agony at not knowing what’s happening to Henri on the Letourneau farm; there’s a persistent dread that James’ noxious rages will attach to Henri like a curse. The book’s multilayered final acts give readers more views of Henri as a young man, but Nolan respects his readers enough to avoid any pat conclusions.

A wrenching and sharply observed novel of unconventional love and family tragedy in 20th-century New England.