Seven Days writers can’t possibly read, much less review, all the books that arrive in a steady stream by post, email and, in one memorable case, as a tone poem recited aloud in our reception area by a Gertrude Stein impersonator. So this monthly feature is our way of introducing you to a handful of new books by Vermont authors. To do that, we present you with a scrumptious little blob of plot summary and a single representative sentence from, yes, page 32.
Smoke From the Sugar House
Michael Isham, self-published, 110 pages. Available for Kindle download for $16.99.
And like most things on a farm, it didn’t happen because of one person.
Chittenden County locals know Williston’s Isham Family Farm as the place to go to pick blueberries, stock up on jugs of maple syrup, cut down Christmas trees and — in recent years — attend somebody’s wedding.
In his self-published memoir, fifth-generation “Farmer Mike” Isham documents the work behind this enterprise, and the people who have chipped in and carried sap buckets since the family settled there in 1871. The eldest of six kids and the one who’s been in charge for the past two decades, Isham is also the farm’s chief historian.
Each of the book’s 31 short chapters reads like a diary entry: stream-of-consciousness, chatty, reflective, filled with childhood recollections and only lightly edited. An old concrete milk can cooler, now in a stone wall marking the property line, serves as a jumping-off point for a dose of dairy history; trips to the cookie jar provide a brief respite — several times a day — from the otherwise taxing schedule. Collectively, these vignettes are a record of old-fashioned farm life and what it takes to keep a farm going in modern times — from crop diversification to hosting opera in a barn.
Oceans to Cross: Amelia Earhart’s Extraordinary Life & Her Fight for Women’s Rights
Amy M. Kleppner, Bloomsbury Academic, 173 pages. $28.
Winning hearts and minds … is important, but women also need laws that prohibit discrimination.
As Amelia Earhart’s last surviving relative, Amy M. Kleppner answered many questions from writers and film producers about her famous aunt “Meely,” who disappeared on a flight over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. After a career as an educator, the Wardsboro resident penned her own biography of “Lady Lindy,” the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and a fierce advocate for women’s rights.
Intended for young adults, Oceans to Cross will capture older readers as well. Kleppner’s vivid anecdotes recount Earhart’s childhood with an alcoholic father and some of her harrowing airborne mishaps. She puts readers firmly in the cockpit as “AE” flies across the Atlantic through blinding fog with a broken altimeter and the blue flames of burning exhaust gases dancing outside the window of her Lockheed Vega.
Kleppner, who died in 2024, leaves no doubt as to why she wrote the book: to ensure that the mystery surrounding her aunt’s disappearance will not overshadow her fight for women’s equality, a central mission in Earhart’s too-short life.
Peddlers, Merchants, & Junk Dealers: Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont
Margaret K. Nelson, New York University Press, 264 pages. $30.
Fishman’s still offered sale items in January, including “one lot women’s coats reduced to $3.98.”
Most Vergennes shoppers probably have no idea that Linda’s Apparel at 175 Main Street is the former Fishman’s Department Store, a landmark of Vermont’s little-known rural Jewish history.
The stories of immigrants like Max Fishman, who arrived in Vergennes around 1900 and scratched his way up into the middle class, have been largely ignored, notes Middlebury College professor emerita Margaret K. Nelson. “The otherwise inclusive Vermont Encyclopedia has an entry for ‘jogbra’ (invented in Vermont),” the sociologist observes dryly in the intro to her latest book, “but none for ‘Jews.’”
Nelson combed through newspapers, diaries and interviews to reconstruct the lives of those who chose to build homes and businesses in small-town Vermont, far from synagogues and kosher butchers. But she had to read mostly between the lines to detect the isolation and antisemitism experienced by owners of what were called “Jew stores.”
Fishman’s heirs insisted he loved Vergennes. In telling his story, Nelson overcomes her own bias to understand that, compared with living in fear of Russian pogroms, life in Vermont must have felt like relative paradise.
Jericho River
Gus Speth, Watershed Publications, 195 pages. $20.
That night Helen told Patton everything about her day with the Jonases.
The fictional town of Jericho River (no relation to Jericho, Vt.) might seem like a sleepy place, but it had a lot going on in the 1960s and ’70s: teen pregnancy, domestic abuse, murder, a plane crash. Jericho River, Strafford author and environmentalist Gus Speth’s new novel, recounts those colorful years in a book-within-a-book by Clare Pascal, a disabled woman who learns her neighbors’ stories from her perch on a balcony above the town’s general store.
Pascal tells us that she started writing the book out of loneliness and without letting townspeople know she was secretly documenting them. Present-tense snippets from her diary relay events of national political importance, often with too much foresight.
Clare centers her manuscript on Helen, a girl who grows up during the course of the book and finds Clare’s manuscript in the novel’s prologue. But the recalled stories are vague and distant. None of the town’s tragedies is more emotionally affecting than the plot of a Lifetime movie as relayed by someone who saw it last month. Though the writer’s maxim is “show, don’t tell,” this novel is a tell-all.
On the Record
Nat Winthrop, Onion River Press, 224 pages. $35.
Hard times have fallen on his consulting business as a result of VREIT publicity.
The sentence above is from “One Man’s Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Vermont Real Estate Investment Trust,” an August 1983 cover story published in the Vermont Vanguard Press, Burlington’s alt-weekly precursor to Seven Days. Its author: journalist and publisher Nat Winthrop, who covered Vermont for half a century.
On the Record, a compilation of 17 of Winthrop’s cover stories in the Vanguard Press, Vermont Times, Vermont Sunday Magazine and Seven Days, is a chronological trip down memory lane for longtime readers of community-centric journalism. Some memories are sweet, including his 1994 interview with ice cream icons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield; others are searing, such as his 1986 exposé on pedophilia in Vermont. Filmmaker Jay Craven provides the foreword, and Winthrop’s preface outlines his entry into Vermont’s journalism scene.
His “beat,” if he ever had one, was interesting people: a chief justice, an in vitro fertilization doctor, a hashish smuggler, a ’60s radical confronting Alzheimer’s. Each story captures a bygone era — with glimpses of Vermont today — and comes with postscripts about where the subjects are now.
This article appears in November 4 • 2026.
