And on it goes, the farm passing from one person to another, some finding hope, some finding love, among a place where sweet peas grow wild like weeds, were a tree grows scarlet fruit, and a blackbird, white as snow, haunts the place still. In the next story we learn more of that love as their daughter must make an impossible decision. The two fall in love, and to prove his love the man goes and gets her a pear tree that will bring forth scarlet fruit. The second is in the next tale, when a young woman looses her family and then her home, until a pair of women from the village convince her to go to the old Hadley farm, where a man who lost his leg to a halibut lives quietly, blacksmithing. Coral plants sweet peas, yards of them, waiting for her family to return, refusing to believe they won’t. This is the first tragedy of the book: the first of these to return is the blackbird, its feathers are now as white as death. He took with him his two sons, and a small blackbird that was his youngest son’s pet. He wanted her to have a strong and safe house, and promised her, after this one last voyage, that he would stay home and concentrate on farming turnips. John Hadley, a Cape Cod fisherman, loved his wife Coral so much that he built her a farm. (Reviewed by Cindy Lynn Speer DEC 19, 2004)
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