A Book of Fields: Tales from the Pioneer Valley

Three kids rob a diner in Greenfield where everyone knows them. A boy goes to the Big E in West Springfield and runs away with the circus. An animal control officer has to shoot a moose in Sheffield. A ghost still roams the flooded and sunken town of Enfield. A prep school teacher in Old Deerfield reenacts the raid of 1704 with his students to disastrous results. These deceptively simple fictional stories share two commonalities--first each one ends in the name of a town that ends in field--Ashfield Northfield Plainfield and so forth. Second most of the stories contain a crime or something like one but this is not a crime novel. Its an exploration of this magical landscape in the Pioneer Valley (or slightly beyond) populated not by magicians or wizards but by very real human beings; its a portrait of a changing world and the men and women who inhabit it: hardy independent passionate hardheaded sometimes a little crazy.