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Phoenix Books is delighted to welcome Vermont author Jodi Lew-Smith to our Essex store for a celebration of her novel, Asa James, and a presentation on the rural Vermont farms that inspired it.Jodi Lew-Smith lives on a hill farm in Hardwick, with her husband, dog, chickens, and 250 apple trees. Her grown children come and go, staying long enough to make her laugh. She has always been a writer but also enjoys biology, which comes out in her fiction. She holds a bachelor’s in English literature, a master’s in botany, and a doctorate in molecular genetics, with which she works as a biocurator for a genomic database based at Stanford. Her stories and essays have appeared in various journals, including a story in The Wax Paper that was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her earlier novel The Clever Mill Horse won the 2014 James River Writers Indie Novel Contest, the 2014 Feathered Quill Book Awards prize for Historical Fiction, and the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Awards prize for Historical Fiction.About the book: 1875 Vermont. Asa James hasn't exactly sucked on the silver spoon. No one chooses to grow up on a rural poor farm, but an orphan with Asa's scarred face has little choice. Determined to be a naturalist and scientific thinker in the vein of Charles Darwin, instead he finds himself thrust alone into the wider world, taking a tutor's position at a mountaintop mansion. There, the widow Caro Rockwell is glossy and sardonic, someone so far outside Asa's experience that she could well be another species. But soon he glimpses the broken woman inside the shell. Amid a series of eerie events, they form a friendship that grows into a sweet and tender sort of love. But from within the many dark recesses of Mansfield Hall, a shameful secret is discovered that will force Asa into making a terrible choice.
"Set in remote Vermont, where the gardens and gravesites whisper secrets, Lew-Smith digs gloriously into the natural world as a metaphor for the unknown and a chilling secret that if revealed would bring Asa's world crashing down." -Sharon J. Wishnow, author of The Pelican Tide
"Asa James offers the very best of historical fiction. In an engrossing story filled with great period detail, readers will root for young Asa as he winds his way through times of hardship, betrayal, love and forgiveness. This is a novel that grabs the reader and doesn't let go. Asa James is a winner." -Mark Mustian, internationally bestselling author of The Gendarme and Boy With Wings
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Event Venue
2 Carmichael St Suite 2 Essex Junction, VT 05452-3170 , 2 Carmichael St, Essex Junction, VT 05452-3170, United States
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