Judith Whitman goes to live with her college teacher father in the Great Plains of northwest Nebraska and meets a slightly older local boy Willy Blunt. Yes, it’s a love story. McNeal is not someone I’d read before, but like others taught under Wallace Stegner’s influence at Stanford, I’ll seek out his books at every opportunity. He’s imagined characters and plot to perfection; his sentences are beautiful. A favorite goes something like this: To Willy’s mind Judith’s summer with him was simply one of her life’s chapters; for Willy it had been the whole book. Just read it!

posted Dec 30, 2011 at 5:52AM

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