My Bring Up

As a kid, Shirly Hook learned how to lasso a rooster, ride a heifer, and turn a steamer trunk into a toboggan. She made friends with a bat. She earned 25 cents an hour hanging wallpaper, saved up for a secondhand bicycle, and was riding it through the woods one day when she got between a panther and its dinner. "A lot of families were really poor, and they had to have an imagination to go along with it," she writes in "My Bring Up," her collection of stories about growing up in rural Vermont in the fifties and sixties. A citizen of the Koasek Traditional Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation, Shirly tells about the traditions that helped her family put food on the table, the legacy of the eugenics program in Vermont, and the ties of love and respect that bind neighbor to neighbor. Her collection of twenty stories is a Vermont treasure.