I really enjoyed reading about other women's lives in this books. Parts are depressing, but the end makes up for it. This was an Oprah's Book Club. This copy in particular was a former library book that I bought at a book sale, so it has a very stiff plastic cover and has the usual library markings/tags/stamps on it. It is 240 pages and the back of the books says: "...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...."

Released on Monday, November 24, 2003 at Bradley University Library 3rd floor in Peoria, Illinois USA.

I put this book out with a "free" note on it!