A Violet Season
A Novel
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The “engrossing” (Booklist) story of a mother who must make questionable sacrifices as her family fights for the survival of their violet farm in turn-of-the-century upstate New York.
The violet industry is booming in 1898, and a Hudson Valley farm owned by the Fletcher family is turning a generous profit for its two oldest brothers. But Ida Fletcher, married to the black sheep youngest brother, has taken up wet nursing to help her family, and her daughter, Alice, has been ordered by her father to leave school and find work or an early marriage.
As they near the brink of losing their share of the farm, the two women make increasingly great sacrifices for their family’s survival, which will take them from their small farming community to the dangerous streets of New York’s Lower East Side and set them against one another in a lifelong struggle for honesty and forgiveness.
Told through the voices of both women against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century America, Violet Season is the story of an unforgettable mother-daughter journey in a time when women were just waking to their own power and independence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her debut novel, Czepiel sensitively traces a struggling rural family at the turn of the 20th century. The Fletchers own a large Hudson Valley violet farm and are very wealthy, except for youngest brother Frank and his wife, Ida, who have been excluded from the good fortune after Frank stole money from his two older brothers several years before the story opens. As punishment, the brothers have made him a hired hand instead of a partner in the profitable family enterprise. Frank becomes obsessed with making money to pay his brothers back and takes daughter Alice to New York City to work as a housekeeper in a brothel with the hope that she will "cross over" and earn the money he needs to pay his debts. He tells his wife that Alice is working in a factory, and while Ida is upset that he took Alice away without consulting her, she has no knowledge of the girl's real situation. By the time Ida finally learns where Alice is, she has been raped and fallen into a serious depression, thinking she's ruined. Although Ida plans to escape from her brutish husband and goes to the city to rescue Alice, the mother-daughter relationship is by then seriously damaged. Czepiel paints an intriguing portrait of agricultural life in upstate New York and catches the flavor of the time in accomplished prose. Her characters are in difficult situations and while they fall a little flat (Frank is especially a caricature), readers will sympathize with the plight of mother and daughter.
