American Cream: A Novel - Hardcover

Tudish, Catherine

3.7

33 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743267699 ISBN 13: 9780743267694

Publisher: Scribner, 2007

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When Catherine Tudish's story collection Tenney's Landing was published in 2005, Margot Livesey said Tudish "casts an irresistible spell" and David Huddle said, "Tenney's Landing conjures up a place and a people with that magical vividness we found in Porter, Welty, Cheever, and Updike." Here, in her first novel, Tudish has fashioned a masterful and intimate portrait of a woman returning, midlife, to the small farming community where she grew up.

After Nathan Rownd is injured in a tractor accident, his daughter, Virginia, leaves her suburban life and returns to Tenney's Landing with her teenage son to work the family farm. She struggles with the long periods of separation from her husband and begrudgingly relearns the insistent, exhausting cadence of farm chores. But when Nathan decides to sell the farm, Virginia realizes how deep her connection to the land is and begins to question who she is and where she belongs.
Catherine Tudish's writing is a tribute to small-town America. In simple, elegant prose she captures the rhythms of everyday life and the moments of truth and transformation that are found there. American Cream is a tender and wise novel by a writer of unusual sensitivity and grace.

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About the Author:

Catherine Tudish is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Tenney's Landing. Tudish taught writing and literature at Harvard for eight years before moving to Vermont to work as a journalist and fiction writer. She now teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and Dartmouth College.

From Publishers Weekly:

Tudish returns to the rural Pennsylvania depicted in her debut story collection, Tenney's Landing, in this restrained novel about a woman reconnecting with her past. The story follows Virginia Rownd, who is grappling with her mother's death and her father Nathan's quick remarriage. Six months after the wedding, Nathan is injured in a tractor accident, and Virginia is called upon to pitch in on the family farm for the summer. A reluctant Virginia drags her 13-year old son, Randall, along and leaves husband Rob in suburban Maryland. On the farm, she hays and milks the cows while attempting to get along with her recalcitrant new stepmother, Lydia. In addition, Virginia reconnects with the townspeople, most notably her ex-boyfriend West Moffat, and friend Hennis Henny Eastman, now in a wheelchair. An additional story line involves Irene, a troubled girl from a broken home whom Randall befriends and Virginia attempts to save, with mixed results. Tudish portrays a realistic world, yet Virginia's abrupt transformation, brought on when her father contemplates selling the farm, is at odds with the novel's unhurried pace. Readers who enjoyed the story collection will appreciate this return journey. (Aug.)
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