Well and Truly offers a realistic and applealing heroine in Maggie Hatch, newly widowed and unprepared to cope...Maggie struggles to escape a lifetime of passivity and the rigid structures of the insular New England community...and her search for redefinition is both believable and engrossing. This is a great story, written with exacting ease, that serves up a rich slice of small-town Vermont life...there are bright flashes of humor and delightfully fresh charactizations to enliven this touching novel of self-discovery. After years in her husband's Vermont hometown, New Yorker Maggie Hatch is still an outsider. She has a mother-in-law who gives her a nervous stomach, a precocious daughter who drops out of Smith College, and her much-beloved doctor husband dies unexpectedly while tying his tennis shoes. So how did it happen that she could be so devasted by her loss, and less than five months later lie trembling in another man's arms. In this wry, poignant novel of loss, redemption, and falling in love all over again, we are reminded that life can throw a curve when we least expect it.

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