Junior year of high school, I wrote a massive term paper on Sarah Orne Jewett – without reading a single thing she had written. I did really well on it, and at the end of the year I felt a bit guilty when my English teacher gave us all little gifts, and mine was a copy of this book. So three years later I finally got around to reading it! It’s a sweet book, not so much plot-driven as a series of character sketches. She’s considered an important American author, and her descriptions of the landscape and the people of a Maine coastal town are really lovely. It’s not a book I’d read again because its lack of plot didn’t really hold my interest. But she really does a masterful job painting a picture of the New England character, in a simpler time.