Genre: Book
Grade: A-/B+
Notable People: Howard Frank Mosher
Title: The Fall of the Year
Review: Mosher is the novel laureate of Vermont…a living legend in these parts…who I knew of but had somehow never read before. After 20 pages, in was thinking he and I were not a match. But, I stuck it out and the book and his style really grew on me. A little bit of Mark Twain in the most remote part of Vermont…the great Northeast Kingdom. Mosher has created a thinly veiled Kingdom County and the surroundings are all very familiar for this part of the world. This is apparently his autobiographical novel (1999) and it is a rich story centered around a young man and his adoptive priest father- the “greatest scholar and third baseman in the history of The Kingdom”-who has spent his life writing a “A Short History of Kingdom County” (now at 5000 pages!!). Full of fortune tellers, circus folk, mystical Quebecois and trout fishing….it is a quaint picture of life in remote Vermont in the 1950s. I’ll be giving Mosher some more attention going forward…he is pretty prolific.