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Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Rule captures the essence of small-town New England life as she paints with a sure hand the fallings-out and friendships, the trials and triumphs of the New England microcosm. In "Yankee Curse," elderly Miranda knits placidly at a town meeting, pondering an amazing string of unspoken invective against an enemy but stopping short at "a curse she would never levy, not even on Mort Wallace: to live too long." In "Minna Runs for Selectman," a middle-aged woman's battlefield is "the strange, incestuous politics of this eccentric little town," but her real opponent is her own insecurity. In "Fishing with George," a small girl worries that "there's a hole in our family that gets bigger every time." In the title story, a mother copes with a hated neighbor through a sculpture that "makes her laugh the kind of laugh that doesn't end in a sob."
Children and grandmothers, trappers and college professors, lifetime Yankees or transplanted Flatlanders: each finds the truth in Rule's observation that "revenge takes many forms--some of which can heal."
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