Category: Pop

Time of the Child, by Niall Williams

Time of the Child, by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury, 287 pages)

Irish noveliest Niall Williams’ latest book is Time of the Child, which revisits the fictional town of Faha, where much lauded 2019 book This is Happiness and another Williams novel, History of the Rain, are set.

It is a holiday novel in that the events take place during the season of Advent and involve lots of holly and a child born under mysterious circumstances. But nothing is lost by reading it in January, and in fact, that timing is possibly better since Time of the Child is a slow-cooker of a book, best read at a leisurely pace. Nothing moves very quickly in Faha, where one of the residents is a dog named Harry whose favorite place to sleep is the middle of the road, requiring drivers to wait for the mutt to move, “in dog-time and untellable weariness,” before they can proceed.

It is that sort of delightful detail that makes Williams such a pleasure to read.

The central characters in this story are a widowed doctor, Jack Troy, and his adult daughter Ronnie (for Veronica), who live at a pace that moves not much faster than the town dog. Troy is 59 and is pretty much going through the motions of life, having lost both his wife and another woman he had fallen in love with after his wife’s passing. As Faha’s only doctor, Troy has little time for despair, though; he is constantly beset with people bringing him their physical complaints, and those of others, everywhere he goes.

Ronnie is his faithful companion and professional assistant, the budding loves of her past unrealized and her two sisters having left town. (“Why would anyone want to live here? … It’s just rain and muck and beasts?” one sister had said.) Father and daughter dwell mostly in companionable silence as they go to Mass at the local Catholic church — where the pastor is slowly slipping into dementia in front of his congregation — and they make house calls throughout the region, visits for which Troy may or may not be compensated.

Enter the child — an abandoned infant, seemingly lifeless, brought to Troy by a 12-year-old boy who found her by a church gate. Dr. Troy is able to resuscitate the baby, and he and Ronnie quickly become attached to her — observing his daughter care for the infant, the doctor realizes, “It was not second nature to her, it was first.”

The presence of an infant changes everything in the household — Ronnie takes on a glow foreign to her father, and in a particularly poignant scene, she watches her usually emotionless father dance to Sinatra holding the baby. “What had come over him was as old as life on earth — a pulsed response to another, outside of and even before the existence of reason, a prime and primal engagement that took its continuance from the expression in the baby’s features. She liked it! And that was everything.”

They are reluctant to relinquish her to the state, which has a poor track record of taking care of children and the elderly (which is the same reason that Troy is so protective of the clearly failing priest), but they also know they cannot keep the child hidden — in Faha, “the lid never stayed on a story.”

And so, casting about desperately for a solution, Troy concocts a scheme to keep the child — the logistics of which also involve the doctor correcting a sin of his past — sending away a young man whom Ronnie had loved years ago. This man, named Noel Crowe, is now living in America, complicating things. (Readers of This is Happiness will recall Noel from that earlier book.)

Like Harry, the weary canine king of Faha blocking traffic in the street, Williams is in no hurry to get where he’s going; the first half of Time of the Child is character development that can frustrate readers who want things to happen. It’s not unusual for dialogue between characters to be interrupted by one or two pages of incidental information before Williams brings us back to the conversation, which a reader might have reasonably thought had ended.

It’s not until the baby arrives more than a hundred pages in that the pace picks up, and then the narrative moves almost too quickly. But Williams knows what he’s doing, and the richness of detail, which might seem unnecessary at times, bestows an intimacy with the characters that pays off — not only the father and daughter and priest, but other residents of the town, including the boy who finds the baby on the day of the town’s Christmas fair, Jude Quinlan, and the adult twins that the townspeople had given up on identifying correctly, so they just combined their names and call both of them Tim-Tom.

It requires commitment to read Time of the Child — not only because you’ll want to read slowly to savor the writing, but because for all practical purposes, you’ll be a citizen of Faha when you’re done, emotionally anyway. Which means you’ll be reading This is Happiness and History of the Rain next — not a bad way to while away the gloom of winter. A —Jennifer Graham

Books of the future

Here are some scheduled 2025 releases book-lovers can get excited about.

• Simply Jamie: Fast & Simple Food by Jamie Oliver (Jan. 7) Jamie Oliver generally permits such cheats as jarred sauces and “cook everything in one pan no really just the one pan.” This book promises recipes such as Gochujang Chicken Noodle Bake and Jarred Pepper Pasta.

• Old School by Gordon Korman (Jan. 14) Middle grade author Korman returns with this novel about a 12-year-old who has lived half his life at his grandmother’s retirement village where he has been home-schooled and schooled in music and culture by the other retirees and now has to attend a kid-filled middle school, according to the book’s description.

• Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis (Jan. 14) It’s the first autobiography ever published by a pope!

• Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (Jan. 21) This third novel in the Empyrean series (Fourth Wing, Iron Flame) set in a military college for dragon riders has the author on a big-city book tour and readers signing up for midnight release parties at bookstores.

• Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates (Feb. 4) One of the world’s richest men writes about his early years, before he co-founded Microsoft. “I’m planning to write two more memoirs, one about my work with Microsoft and one about philanthropy,” he says at gatesnotes.com. “But Source Code is my origin story, and I’m looking forward to sharing it.”

• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler(Feb. 11) It’s a new Anne Tyler novel, her 25th. In this one, “a socially awkward mother of the bridge navigates the days before and after her daughter’s wedding,” the publisher says.

• The Art of the SNL Portrait Photography by Mary Ellen Matthews (March 4) The 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live marches on with this book of images from the show’s bumper photos featuring hosts and musical guests, according to the book’s description.

• I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, 1919 (the Graphic Novel) by Lauren Tarshis, illustrated by Karen De la Vega (March 4) If this graphic novel series is how you introduce your kids to historical events, check out this one set in Boston.

• Sunrise on the Reaping: A Hunger Games Novel by Suzanne Collins (March 18) This second prequel is set after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes but before the original trilogy and focuses on the Hunger Games of Haymitch Abernathy.

• When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi (March 25) He won a Hugo award for Redshirts, he was creative consultant for the Stargate TV series, and now he’s back with a novel about the moon actually being made of cheese.

• The Choi of Cooking: Flavor-Packed, Rule-Breaking Recipes for a Delicious Life by Roy Choi with Tien Nguyen and Natasha Phan (April 15) Sample pages feature Kimchi Steak Tacos and Lo Mein Spaghetti — which paints a picture of the approach of this chef who is serious about food but not fussy about rules. In the meantime, check out Choi’s MasterClass, which has a commendable amount of swears.

• Great Big Beautiful Life Emily Henry(April 22) The #1 NYT Bestselling author of Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation and other contemporary romances gives us a fresh competitors-to-lovers tale.

• Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles (April 22) She’s a fashion designer, a businesswoman, and mom to Beyonce and Solange. Is it any wonder her new memoir comes in at 448 pages, longer than the Pope’s and Bill Gates’?

• Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (May 13) The Pulitzer-winning biographer (Washington: A Life) comes out with 1,200 pages on the life of the 19th-century humorist, steamboat pilot and writer.

• My Friends by Fredrik Backman (May 20) Teenagers and art and a cross-country journey from the author of A Man Called Ove and so many other novels, whose Instagram you should check out for more self-deprecating humor and German shepherd antics.

Album Reviews 24/12/26

Kristian Montgomery and the Winterkill Band, Prophets of the Apocalypse (self-released)

When last we left Cape Cod-based bandleader Montgomery I was on the verge of anointing him the Tom Petty of New England, but that feels a little inadequate; local achievement is generally regarded by the public as almost meaningless in comparison to national success no matter the level of enthusiasm from hometown wags. I mean, he’s been nominated for some pretty notable awards, including a (nationally renowned) Josie and a Boston Music Award in 2021, which somehow led to his having beef with the committee owing to his disgust for their lack of recognition for blue-collar artists. He’s a rebel, this guy, and has a ton of working-class cred. In this EP he blends Petty with Florida Georgia Line in the timely blue-collar protest song “American Fire” and country-fies early Kings Of Leon in “Leaving Texas.” He’s a legitimate badass, folks; I literally had to troll him into letting me hear this record in advance, a very rare thing with hungry local bands. Please support this man. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Adam Birnbaum, Preludes (self-released)

This one’s a year old now, but the fellow who’s helping to promote this world-class pianist is trying to break into the upper echelons of the music business, and he’s a nice guy, so here goes. This album spotlights a piano, upright bass and percussion trio taking on a formidable set of Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions, along the way adding elements of jazz, Latin, swing and straight eighth-note, taking liberties with feel and improvisation. There are YouTube videos of these cool customers going at it, and it’s quite a sight; Matt Clohesy playing his bass after a showy, Jaco Pastorius fashion; percussionist Keita Ogawa looking quite comfortable and Birnbaum appearing as if he’d literally invented the piano he’s playing. “Prelude in Db Major” bops right along most ambitiously, all but stripped of its classical nature; “Prelude in C Major” retains much of the latter but does eventually settle into a light, piano-bar groove. Terrific stuff. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• At this writing, Genius.com tells me there are only two new music albums scheduled for traditional Friday release this week, on Dec. 27, two days after the big pagan holiday, whatever it’s called. No, I’m kidding, I know it’s called “Christmas,” but according to a popular meme that made the rounds this holiday season, Christians once actually tried to get rid of Christmas at one time, wouldn’t that have been a bummer? No, seriously, according to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ website, “In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a law called Penalty for Keeping Christmas. The notion was that such ‘festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries’ were a ‘great dishonor of God and offence of others.’ Anyone found celebrating Christmas by failing to work, ‘feasting, or any other way … shall pay for every such offence five shillings [This would be about $48 today].’” The Commonwealth eventually came to realize what a dumb idea that was, and by 1681 all the witch-burning pilgrims could watch the Grinch again, but even today some musical artists couldn’t care less if it was Christmas or National Possum Day or whatever, they insist on putting out albums. For example, there’s Jorge Rivera-Herrans, a mildly popular playwright, composer, lyricist and actor from Dorado, Puerto Rico. His new record, Epic: The Ithaca Saga, is a po-faced concept album that was released on Christmas; it includes a song called “God Games” that’s racked up more than six million views on YouTube. It comprises opera-based techno-driven nonsense that’s actually kind of brilliant in a technical sense, and a lot of people like it, so I suppose there’s a chance he’ll someday become some sort of male version of Enya for Greek mythology wonks. I mean, I fully expect never to hear anything from him again unless I’m at a sci-fi convention or somesuch, but weird things happen all the time.

• Also on Christmas, K-pop band 2NE1 released a 15-track album titled Welcome Back, which commemorates their ongoing (four years and counting) tour of the same name. Their bouncy, brainless Lady Gaga-style stuff borrows from all sorts of international styles and features a lot of sexytime butt-dancing and all the other stuff that’s been portending the collapse of Western civilization since 2005 or so.

• In normal album-release news, this Friday sees the release of the second album from Harshmxjb (real name Harsh Mishra), a musician from New Delhi, India. This feller is a typical underground culture-jammer, a 19-year-old who’s been exploiting the open-door policy of Spotify, Apple Music and all the other music sites, uploading hip-hop tunes like “Alone,” in which he sings off-key, like a brain-damaged Usher, over a melancholy, non-awful piano-driven beat (that song actually got some love on TikTok and YouTube).

• We’ll wrap up the week with an album that’s neither silly, performatively epic nor K-pop, a new one from singer Robbie Williams, whom you know from British boyband Take That, which was originally triangulated by conniving record company lizard-people as the U.K.’s answer to New Kids on the Block. That was a long time ago, of course; Williams has been a solo art-fraud since 1995, not that American audiences have paid much attention to him, but regardless, the new LP is Better Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). Given that the movie is about Williams’ career, he was probably a good choice to soundtrack it; these things aren’t difficult to figure out.

Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishøi

Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishøi (Grove Press, 192 pages)

It’s been 181 years since A Christmas Carol was published, and so it’s past time for another author to give us a compact, memorable holiday book that becomes as much a part of the season as shopping and eggnog. The Dickens classic was a marvel of brevity, coming in at just about 30,000 words, which is surely one reason it remains popular. No one has time to read, say, Richard Powers in December.

Three years ago, I had hopes for Small Things Like These, a slim novel written by the Irish novelist Claire Keegan, which turned up as Oprah Winfrey’s book club pick this month even though it was published in 2021. That book (Grove Press, 118 pages) wasn’t about Christmas, per se, but is set around Christmastime and has, at the heart of its deeply affecting story, a working-class man who was born to a teenage housekeeper. Furlong never knew who his father was, and yet grows up to be happily married with five daughters and becomes a sort of social justice warrior by accident when he makes a disturbing discovery while delivering coal, a reliable staple of Christmas stories.

Small Things Like These has a Truman Capote “A Christmas Memory” vibe to it, in the telling of Furlong’s back story, with passages like this:

“On Christmas morning, when he’d gone down to the drawing room [his mother’s employer] occasionally let them share, the fire was already lighted and he’d found three parcels under the tree wrapped in the same green paper: a nailbrush and a bar of soap were wrapped together in one. The second was a hot water bottle … And from Mrs. Wilson, he’d been given A Christmas Carol, an old book with a hard red cover and no pictures, which smelled of must.”

Or maybe that is a Little Women vibe. At any rate, there are letters written to Santa, and a Christmas Mass, and an ending with the kind of wild and irrational hope befitting a good Christmas story. A Christmas Carol it’s not, but it was Dickensonian enough that I decided to add the book to my Christmas collection when I finished it last year.

Now Grove Press has published another slim Christmas-themed novel, Brightly Shining, by the Norwegian author Ingvild Rishoi (translated into English by Carolina Waight). In Norway, where the book was published in 2021 under the title Stargate, the author has been compared to Dickens and also Hans Christian Andersen (who, lest we forget, gave us “The Little Mermaid” before Disney did).

Brightly Shining is the story of a 10-year-old girl (who, in Victorian times, would have been characterized as a waif) and her struggle to maintain hope in seemingly hopeless circumstances. Ronja lives with her 16-year-old sister Melissa, in an impoverished household ostensibly headed by their father, who is addicted to alcohol, has trouble holding down a job, and is usually failing to provide support of any kind for his daughters. Most of the time, there is nothing for the girls to eat but cereal, and there is no mother in the home, although Melissa tries as best as she can to be a mother to her sister.

One day, a caretaker at Ronja’s school, who is aware of the situation, points out a flier advertising a job selling Christmas trees, and she takes it home to her father. After at first dismissing it as “a job for country bumpkins,” he relents and is hired, giving wings to Ronja’s hopes: that there might be enough money for food and gifts and a Christmas tree of their own. Her biggest dream, though, is that the family may one day have a cabin of their own in the woods.

As Ronja, the narrator, recounts: “ ‘Miracles do happen,’ the caretaker used to say. ‘Sometimes there just isn’t any other way out, and that’s when a miracle happens.’”

But that’s not how things transpire. Old patterns repeat, and Melissa takes over the job selling Christmas trees, with Ronja showing up at times just to watch, and eventually getting involved in the operation.

A bully of a boss turns into the story’s villain, and Ronja befriends a widowed man living in their building, leading to one of the book’s most poignant scenes, at a holiday pageant at Ronja’s school. The old man, Aronsen, does what he can to help Ronja, feeding her a real breakfast, ironing a dress for the school pageant and even buying greenery at the Christmas tree lot, but his efforts, and Melissa’s, cannot make up for the loss of functioning parents in the child’s life, even though, as she says, “I can’t not hope. That’s just the way my brain is.”

As in Small Things Like This, Brightly Shining attempts to give us the happiest ending possible while being honest about reality, which is to say, it’s not really a happy ending at all, especially after all the talk about miracles. Let’s just say it’s as happy an ending as O’Henry gave us in “The Gift of the Magi,” meaning it requires aggressive spin to cast either book as a feel-good Christmas story.

Not to say that both books aren’t beautifully crafted — they are. Not to say that they’re not memorable — they are. It’s just that I’ve been forever ruined by the last chapter of A Christmas Carol and seek that level of merriment in my Christmas reads, which Brightly Shining and Small Things Like These refuse to supply. God bless them, anyway. B+

Album Reviews 24/12/12

Crayon, Home Safe (self-released)

Lots to unpack from this French producer’s upcoming 2025 debut album, the first thing being the fact that I usually can’t stomach French music and was surprised to like this stuff, the second being that it’s almost painfully art-wonky; if you were at all confused or triggered by the bizarre opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympics, you should stick to something more meat-and-potatoes than this, just trying to help. Toward the latter, the video for the title track is one of the weirdest you’ll ever see, combining performance art and ballet in a presentation that, like the cover art, will surely be misinterpreted by unqualified critics as a shocking glamorization of the KKK (it isn’t at all). Artists gotta art, you see, and this guy’s been lucky enough to be introduced to and seen by the right people; among other things, he’s written platinum hits for French rap artists like Josman. The music itself has haunted house elements, i.e. slow techno exercises that sound like Heligoland-era Massive Attack after the guys drank a gallon of Robitussin. It’s plenty melodic, and to say it’s unapologetically urban would be the understatement of the decade. Perfect stuff for a perfectly broken planet. A



Victoria Monét, A Jaguar II Christmas: The Orchestral Arrangements (RCA Records)

Talk about under the wire; I was sifting through my emailbox for a metal or noise album to review here in order to finish off the week quickly when this one — an actual holiday record! — popped up. If you weren’t aware that AOR-R&B was even still being made by anyone, you can make room in your stack of Anita Baker and Toni Braxton albums for Monét, a multiple Grammy winner who worked her way up from the songwriting bullpen to bathe the world in her own brand of expensive-hotel vibe, with hits like the yacht rock-bordering “On My Mama,” which gets a bedroom-chill overhaul here, as well as subtle “12 Days Of Christmas” interpositions. That kind of thing goes on a lot on this record: Monét is a creative soul, well-versed in symphonics; in the appropriately named “Cadillac Christmas” she inserts snatches of “Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy” into a yacht-hip-hop beat while maintaining her understated street cred (don’t try that at home; it’s a difficult trick). Wonderfully tasteful, this. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yee-ha, our next album-release Friday is Dec. 20, when people like me, CD reviewers with weekly columns that need to be filled with news of new albums, sit in our glittering snow drifts on The Island Of Misfit Toys, with nothing to talk about at all. There aren’t many new CDs that come out this time of year; all the “important” new albums have already come out and we already made fun of them gave them a thorough, professional evaluation, for the edification of you, our faithful readers. And so, like a Charlie In The Box, or a squirt gun that shoots Polaner All-Fruit instead of water, or a toy cowboy who rides an ostrich, I sit alone, in my completely unorganized trash heap of an office, waiting to hear the jingling of sleigh bells, that magical sound that heralds the arrival of Santa Claus, who will, I hope against hope, bring me albums to talk about in this award-winning space. I get so looooonely this time of year, guys, passing the endless hours, with no albums to critique, trying to ignore the urge to have a Skittles-eating contest with myself or just leave this page blank until tomorrow and go back to binging reruns of Match Game ’78 on the Buzzr channel, wasn’t Charles Nelson Reilly a funny fellow? Oh forget it, no one wants a misfit social media-addicted CD reviewer when the music market is oversaturated, good grief, why didn’t I stock up on Kleenex, I just hope none of you nice people ever have to — wait! Do you hear that, folks? And look! A bright red shiny nose-sized light, making straight for me! It’s —! It’s —! It’s — SANTA! Wait, Santa threw me something, wrapped in shiny paper and a nice bow! Yow, I can’t even believe it, it’s a new album, coming out on Dec. 20, for this column! Let’s see, I’m so excited, this album’s from some band I’ve never heard of — of course it is — called Fish in a Birdcage and it is titled Mentors! Well, let me look into this. They’re from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which probably explains why they’re putting out an album five days before ChristmaHannaKwanzaa, I don’t think they don’t have holidays in Canada except for Guillotine Day or whatever it is, could someone text me the Widipedia deets on that before my hands finish typing this entire column? Wait, no, I get it now, this is an actual band, not a joke YouTube-only hip-hop band like the one I wrote about two years ago, these guys have an actual record contract, with Nettwerk Records, which is literally my favorite record company to receive albums from. What does all this mean? It means they must have been contractually obligated to put out an album before the end of the year or else, you know how it goes! But guess what, this is a good band, judging by the first single, “Badger.” It’s a stompy tune that’s part Strokes, part Billy Squier and part Scottish-ren-faire grog-folk; I’m seriously impressed. Thank you for giving me a holly jolly Christmas, Santa! On, Dasher! On, Whatsyourface!

• Anyway, folks, that’s it for the least happy time of the year for us misfit CD reviewers! I’d like to thank the dude who sold me the nice expensive coffee mugs at World Market in Bedford, N.H., Petunia will definitely love them, and furthermore — wait! Look! One of Santa’s reindeer left me a present! — No, not that, don’t be gross, it’s another album! This one’s from some British “comedy music” kid who calls himself ZEDNED, and it’s titled Do You Think I Give A S—t. No, seriously, it’s an actual album, fam, it’s on Spotify and Apple Music and whatnot, so I’m going to listen to the song “Jake Jake Jake,” which is probably about ZEDNED himself, because his “real name” is Jake Muscles. Let’s see — OK, OK, it’s a joke song, with a totally canned trap-and-wub-wub beat, and he’s talking about gross sexytime stuff. Do not buy.

North Country land struggle

Filmmaker looks at colonial territories

Jay Craven is an award-winning veteran New England filmmaker. He spoke with the Hippo about his 10th narrative feature film, Lost Nation. Craven is known for making Northern New England Westerns. His titles include Where the Rivers Flow North with Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox, Disappearances with Kris Kristofferson, and Northern Borders with Bruce Dern. He has taught for 25 years at Marlboro College in southern Vermont as well as Sarah Lawrence College. At Marlboro he educates students on how to make movies by involving them in the movie-making process. Lost Nation will kick off a series of New Hampshire screenings at Red River Theatres on Friday, Dec. 13, running through Thursday, Dec. 19. Craven will be appearing at select showings that opening weekend. Visit redrivertheatres.org for more information.

Would you like to give a brief overview of the film?

It’s basically a historical action drama and it’s set in the North Country during the period of the American Revolution. It involves the fact that the huge territory that is now considered Vermont was contested territory at that time between New York and the territory. Meanwhile, a scrappy and some could argue somewhat corrupt New Hampshire governor, Benning Wentworth, started issuing titles to poor farmers and settlers coming out of southern New England, New York claimed. It precipitated an intense struggle between the settlers who were settling the land and New York, which late in the game decided they’d better start settling the land or else it was going to disappear.

A drama unfolded where the New Hampshire grants holders, led by Ethan Allen and others — Ethan Allen considered sort of a founding father of Vermont — resisted New York encroachments on the land that they were settling. It’s the drama of this land conflict between New Hampshire and New York, led by the settlers on the New Hampshire grants. Ethan Allen is a central character, and also Lucy Terry Prince, who was a pioneering Black poet who settled with her family on a New Hampshire grant in southeastern what is now Vermont, Guilford, near Brattleboro, an area that was a stronghold of New York sentiment. It was a very turbulent setting for them to try to both settle their homestead, also as Black people. The film captures the drama of land and freedom — in the case of Ethan Allen, on a huge scale, involving the entire state of Vermont, which frankly he and his brother ended up owning 200,000 acres, because they were land speculators, too. And on a smaller scale, the Prince family, which was trying to simply secure and develop their 100-acre homestead using a New Hampshire grant. It’s a historical action drama around the high-stakes land struggle between New Hampshire and New York, which resulted in that contested territory becoming at first the independent republic of Vermont and later the state of Vermont.

Would you want to go more in depth on Lucy Terry Prince?

Yeah, Lucy Terry Prince was enslaved at the age of 3 to a family in western Massachusetts for 30 years, serving that family, but she also was a poet, and only one of her poems actually survives, which is called ‘Bars Fight,’ about the 1746 Deerfield Massacre, where indigenous fighters allied with the French attacked settlers in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her poem told the story and was known far and wide and was passed on orally, but it’s the first known work of African American literature. And she was known for convening sort of story soirees on the porch of the family that she was working for, of their house, and would bring by storytellers and poets and people making up stuff as they went along. Another former slave, Abijah Prince, married her and bought her freedom with money that he earned fighting in the French and Indian War, and he was gifted this 100-acre plot of land in Guilford, and over five years developed [it] and brought his family here. When they brought their family here, their closest neighbor became an antagonist, wanting their land and also just sort of harassing them and making their life very difficult. You know, spoiling their crops and scattering their feed to the wind and letting their animals loose and, you know, attacking and beating them and burning their hay rake and stuff like that, so Lucy developed a strategy essentially to defend her family in the moment but more so in court all the way to what was called in Vermont the governor’s supreme council. [She] prevailed, you know, which would have been extremely unusual, frankly, for a woman, let alone a Black woman, to accomplish during this time. She was smart, and she was not going to take it lying down, and she, in what was already a very turbulent, deeply divided political situation, was able to push through and assert her family’s rights and two of her sons fought the American Revolution. Only one of her poems survives, but … she was definitely known as a storyteller and to a certain extent a visionary. … So it’s two different stories of the struggle for land and freedom, one on a big scale, one on a small intimate scale, but they are parallel and they overlap briefly.

With Ethan Allen, could he be considered a founding father of New Hampshire as well?

Well, he was working under New Hampshire jurisdiction when he started the struggle, so absolutely he would have been considered a New Hampshire pioneer because it was New Hampshire territory that he was defending against New York, so in some ways Vermont was born out of New Hampshire and was born out of a sort of, we could call solidarity, generosity, imagination, greed, whatever you want to call it. But no, there’s no question that when Ethan began his land struggle against New York, he was doing it on behalf of the New Hampshire granted territory.

How did this whole specific situation arise?

Benning Wentworth, the New Hampshire governor, commissioned 131 towns in that territory and he kept parcels of land in each town that were his, but they were running a pretty active land business. If it weren’t for this land struggle, the territory of Vermont would be New York. Although, what we also show in the movie is that when things got tough in this land struggle, Ethan Allen and his brother entered negotiations with the British during the American Revolution to actually deliver that territory to the British. So it could have also ended up part of Canada because there were some attacks coming from Quebec into Vermont. The Americans were not defending them and the Continental Congress did not like what Ethan was doing, because New York had a lot of power in the Continental Congress, including the fact that Alexander Hamilton was a representative from New York. Likewise, the governor of New York, George Clinton, was a very powerful figure. Ethan went to the Continental Congress twice begging the case of vermont or the territory against New York and was rejected.

What area of land is this referencing? What would it have made the United States look like today?

Well it would have been the whole state of, the area that is currently the whole state of Vermont would have been New Hampshire, all the way over to Lake Champlain. Because it’s interesting, New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth, the New Hampshire governor, claimed he settled it first and established political control on the entire western part of the state. So it was odd. The area that was closest to New Hampshire was controlled by New York. The area that was closest to New York was controlled by New Hampshire. … I mean, it was intense. But then the film goes over how all the colonies came into their own statehood. —Zachary Lewis

Books to give

Looking to gift a book? Here are some of the books our reviewers loved this year:

William, by Mason Coile I don’t like horror, but I loved this absorbing, disturbing little book. —Jennifer Graham

Funny Story, by Emily Henry This isn’t all fluff and love, and I don’t think I rolled my eyes once. It is definitely funny, but it’s so much more than that, too: It’s a story of human relationships and all of the messiness and intensity that come along with them, how they can start and end in the most unpredictable ways, and how we all have the capacity to overcome heartbreak and learn to love again. —Meghan Siegler

Playground, by Richard Powers This novel wants us to to think deeply about the unintended consequences of the development of AI and human dominance of the planet as we wade through the events of each character’s life, laid out in constantly changing points of view. For those willing to rise to the challenge Playground is a wholly immersive experience [that] gives the reader a mental workout. —JG

The Women, by Kristin Hannah Hannah superbly blends the heaviness of war with the frailty of humans at their most vulnerable — and often at their best. —MS

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, by Priyanka Mattoo Mattoo’s writing is exquisite …. It’s been a while since I enjoyed a collection of essays so much. —JG

The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson Larson tells stories that explain the onset of the Civil War better than any AP history course ever could. Nobody does it better when it comes to putting readers in the trenches of history, in this case with cannonballs whizzing over our heads. —JG

And here are a few more recent releases that may make good gifts.

What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World’s Most Famous Bird, by Sy Montgomery (96 pages) Montgomery is also the author of The Soul of an Octopus and other books about animals. She lives in New Hampshire.

Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, by Rob Sheffield “An impassioned dissertation on (almost) all things Swiftian,” says the Washington Post of this book by a veteran Rolling Stone writer.

Atlas Obscura: Wild Life, by Cara Ciaimo and Joshua Foer A guide to giant Gippsland earthworms, hot springs snow monkeys, vampire finches and other amazing creatures of the world. “The perfect tome to get lost in on a rainy day,” said Taste of Home. Check out AtlasObscura.com.

Webb’s Universe, by Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock A catalog of images from the James Webb Space Telescope along with backstory on the science behind them, from a British space scientist.

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