Show Me Good Land - Hardcover

From a small airplane, Aroostook County-THE County, as it's known here in Maine-is a patchwork of potato fields and forest stands, pond and farmsteads, also towns strung like cultured pearls along the roads and rivers. Show Me Good Land is like that, too, an intricately plotted and subtly colored quilt of the flummoxed lives of the people down there, where roots go deep and dreams fly high. It's a wonderful cast of deeply drawn characters, all brought together by a murder in a land where that kind of violence is as rare as gold. -Bill Roorbach, author of Big Bend, Temple Stream, and The Smallest Color. The setting of Show Me Good Land may be Aroostook County, Maine, but the rich sadness of Shonna Humphrey's characters, her haunting portrait of a bewildered, isolated community, reminded me powerfully of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. -Richard Russo Shonna Humphrey possesses that rare thing: a true and utterly distinctive American voice, full of the grit and texture of place, compassion and authenticity. She does not so much tell her story; she inhabits it. Every page feels real. -Joyce Maynard, author of Labor Day, To Die For, and At Home in the World This engrossing portrait of a place is hard to look away from, the way a battle scene or a plane crash can be. With tender insight and a hard wit, Shonna Milliken Humphrey has created characters much like the ones from my own hometown, the ones who cheat and steal and love and strive-whatever is necessary to cobble together a life on the hard land, at the end of the road. Any road, anywhere. -Hannah Holmes, author of The Well-Dressed Ape

Set in fictional Fort Angus, Maine, Show Me Good Land tells the story of a small rural town struggling with poverty and decay after decades of prosperity. Loosely linked through a grisly murder, its characters must navigate the ambiguous moral landscape of a waning community. It is a moving, sometimes melancholy, often funny novel about family, community, loss, redemption, and coming home. The pleasure lies in exploring the personalities of the characters, none of whom are all good or all bad, and eventually deciding where the reader's own moral lines are drawn. Not since Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, has a cast of characters been so shocking, beautifully rendered, and ultimately likeable.