Carrie Brown's three novels-Rose's Garden, Lamb in Love, and The Hatbox Baby-have established her as a writer who works from curiosity, skillful research, and a vivid imagination. Her reviewers have praised her "rich characterizations" (The Dallas Morning News) and her "profound, gentle insights."(The Orlando Sentinel) This first book of stories confirms those attributes seven times over. The generosity of Brown's storytelling style has never been more in evidence. Each of these seven stories presents a different authentic world-a divorcTe's spacious rent-controlled NYC apartment, a widow's Maryland neighborhood, horseback-riding camp for girls in England, a residential seaside resort in Rhode Island, a remote mountain village in Spain, a tidewater Virginia inn that flourished in the post-Civil War era, and, in the wonderful title story, a most unusual mortuary in Maine. Each one is so vividly created and populated that the experiences for the reader are remarkably novelistic. We've been taken inside seven very private places by a guide whose gentle insights are indeed profound. THE HOUSE ON BELLE ISLE will cement Carrie Brown's growing reputation as a fiction writer of deep resources and unlimited powers of imagination. This sweet collection of stories by Virginia native Brown (The Hatbox Baby, Rose's Garden) offers intimate glimpses into the various lives and landscapes being portrayed. The title story offers a slightly gruesome account of a remote Maine location where Louis's grandmother, Louise, found her calling as an undertaker. Louis cautiously decides to pass on his grandmother's story to his visiting schoolteacher granddaughter. In "Friend to Women," 51-year-old Claire convinces her husband to rent a house by the coast for a year, and the whole of the story recounts their drive to see the house for the first time as they move. In all the stories, there is an urgent poignancy in the telling, and the characters' emotional lives are laid bare to the reader. Fans of her novels will not be disappointed. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Short stories are often snapshots, brief glimpses into characters' lives and times. But the seven stories in this collection, each distinct in time and place, are so keenly insightful and well shaped that they seem more novels in miniature than short stories. Solitary Gregorio is close to opening the miniature museum he took 15 years to build in his Italian village when his hands are irreparably damaged in "Miniature Man." Ginger and Fanny, miles apart socioeconomically and geographically, form a friendship that spans years and enriches the life of Ginger's mother as well in "The Correspondent." In "Wings," a beautiful bird wanders into a yard and alters the life of a widow stuck in a routine with her well-meaning brother-in-law. Brown, praised for her novels Rose's Garden (1998), Lamb in Love (1999), and The Hatbox Baby (2000), shows the same sure touch in these wonderfully resonant stories. Michele Leber Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "...a gentle journey through wistful memories, suffused with subdued longing....Brown's prose is fluid and graceful..." -- Publisher's Weekly "...wonderfully resonant stories." -- Booklist "An accomplished debut collection of seven stories demonstrates the versatility of novelist Brown." -- Kirkus Reviews Praise for CARRIE BROWN: "Carrie Brown beguiles readers with her emotionally resonant storytelling." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Luminous and wise." - The New York Times Book Review "(Her work) glows with small miracles and large revelations. Its charming, inventive lyricism, uncanny wisdom, and touches of the comic and the poignant easily persuade us to lose our own hearts to her characters." - The Orlando Sentinel Carrie Brown, a former journalist, lives in Sweet Briar, Virginia, with her husband, the novelist John Gregory Brown, and their three children. Her first novel, Rose's Garden , won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Her most recent book, The Hatbox Baby , won the 2001 Great Lakes Booksellers Association award for fiction and the 2001 Library of Virginia Literary Award. Duncan drove and Claire sat in the passenger seat beside him, the letter with directions to the house they were renting for the next year open on her lap. They had slowed down for Claire to look for landmarks, which she was trying to do while also listening to Duncan. The couple to whom they had rented their own house in Providence, a perfectly sane-seeming art history professor and his wife and their two children, were young and friendly, a matched set of sinewy runners who rolled their eyes in feigned despair at Providence's steep hills, though Claire knew perfectly well that they thought themselves equal to any ascent. She herself felt more than usually earthbound in their presence by her own elliptical shape, at five foot two and a strai