City Baker’s Guide to Country Living, Louise Miller, 2016

Miller is a Boston baker who received a Grub Street grant and turned out this first novel about a Boston baker who moves to Guthrie, Vermont in the Northeast Kingdom and finds love and success.  This is exactly the kind of novel that I usually avoid, but it turned out to have vivid prose, life-like, credible characters whom I came to care about, and the Vermont countryside and small town life that I love to encounter.  Never going to win the Pulitzer, but a comfortable, late Fall, cuddle up on the couch or second floor landing read.  Olivia Rawlings, Martin McCracken, Henry and Dolly, Margaret Hurley, Hannah and Jonathan—all fine people though a bit uni-dimensional.  A second novel will be a leap for Miller.