Surrender

A woman retreats from academic life in New York City to manage a family goat farm in New England, a novel that Richard Russo calls splendid and provides what I crave from all stories: vividly drawn characters worth spending time with and a richly rendered place for them to inhabit.Lucy Richard has enjoyed a two-decade-long, successful career in public relations in New York City when she feels compelled to move back to rural Massachusetts to try to save her fathers farm. Returning to her childhood home at age 47 is hard enough, but the difficulties multiply once shes settled in: her determination to raise dairy goats and make cheese is hampered at first by her total inexperience, and then by the sudden loss of her farming mentor. To make matters worse, her husband, Michael, who followed her to the farm reluctantly and who has made a disastrous financial decision, is suddenly in severely declining health.Lucy finds solace in Sandy, a girlhood companion who quickly becomes more than a friend, but their new intimacy places the Richard farm in the crosshairs of Sandys employer, a solar energy company. How Lucy contends with the precariousnessat once financial, physical and emotional of her new life, and with the competing passions and obligations that grow within and around her, is at the heart of this intimate drama of love and loss, of desire and friendship, and of the alluring possibilities of second acts.