Vinegar Hill

By: A. Manette Ansay

Narrated by: Debra Monk

In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilt and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill -- a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of bitterness and routine -- where calculated cruelty is a way of life preserved and perpetuated in the service of a rigid, exacting and angry God. Behind a facade of false piety, there are sins and secrets in this place that could crush a vibrant yhoung woman's passionate spirit. And here Ellen must find the strength to endure, change, and grow in the all-pervading darkness that threatens to destroy everything she is and everyone she loves.

Every woman should read this book!

Though all women have experienced these traumas within their families, or know others who may have, this story plays a tune which will ring genuine.

Slow.... Sad... Slow...

I really struggled to finish this book, it was only the narrator who made it bearable, she did what she could. I don't think I would have bothered to keep turning pages, the fact that some e was reading it to me, made it more likely for me to finish. I wish i had known that it was endorsed by Oprah before starting, a sad story about a Co dependent middle aged woman. We didn't even get the mild satisfaction of actually seeing the protagonist do anything about her situation, just resolve to do so. She probably didn't. I will give it to the author, she certainly created atmosphere, I was perfectly depressed when I was done.