The Winter People (2014) by Jennifer McMahon

1001 Novels: A Library of America 

The Winter People 

by Jennifer McMahon (2014)

West Berlin, Vermont

Vermont: 1/7

  Welcome to Vermont!  Vermont is the state with the second lowest population in the United States (643k) so it isn't surprising that it only gets seven titles on the 1001 Novels: A Library of America, list.   If you had to compare New England to a family,  Massachusetts's would be the patriarch/matriarch figure.  Rhode Island would be the rebellious older brother, Maine would be the older sibling who went to work in the forest and/or the sea and New Hampshire and Vermont would be like a pair of twins: New Hampshire, serious minded and dull, Vermont, free-wheeling and hippie-ish.  The major characteristic of the population of Vermont is the impact of outsiders who started moving into Vermont during the 1960's as part of the larger "back to the land" movement.  Today, these emigrants have made it all the way to the top both in government, i.e. Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean and in business, i.e. Ben and Jerry's.  It's gotten to the point where you would be hard pressed to get an outsider to identify anything else about the state. 

  New Englanders who have lived there since before the 60's are more likely to describe Vermont as a depressed, isolated backwoods area with little to offer anyone- I've heard this said by older, lifelong residents of other New England states.   The Winter People takes this flow of emigrants as its starting point, since it is about the adventures of a family of outsiders who move to a small town in northern Vermont from New York City.   When the curtain rises, dad, an antiques dealer/antiquarian is dead, of a heart attack, leaving Mom and her two daughters, one a sprightly teenager, the other a precocious 6 year old, to fend for themselves in classic "back to the land" style.  The family makes do growing crops and selling eggs at the farmers market.  They don't have computers or cell phones and Mom is described by daughter as having a deep mistrust government.

 Oh and they live on a farm that has a rocky outcroppings called "the Devil's Hand" which may be a kind of "portal" that allows the dead to be reanimated as "sleepers."  Yes, it's a supernatural thriller.  I gather from my Google search that McMahon is a moderately succesful writer of supernatural thrillers that always involve peril to a young girl- since that is literally the cover image of all of her books.  She's put at least one title "on the New York Times best seller list" and her Amazon product listings boast between mid thousands and mid hundreds numbers of reviews, which is good by the standards of literary fiction but just ok for authors of popular fiction.   There isn't anything remotely literary about The Winter People and I was kind of bummed that I checked out the Audiobook because even at 2x speed I had to spend five hours of my life waiting for Fred & Scooby Doo to unmask the real killer.

  I thought the resolution was preposterous.