Excerpt from The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

“Well, honey, just pull the shade,” advised my mother when I told her how I couldn’t sleep past dawn in that room.

“As long as you’re getting up so early, why don’t you go down to Haugland’s?” said my aunt Beth, refilling my coffee cup. (She had assumed without asking that I liked coffee, and to my surprise, I found I did.) “I know they’re hiring down there.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, heaping a spoonful of jam on my toast. My aunt had a pantry full of fancy stuff she ordered from specialty catalogs—cylinders of German cookies, imported tins of fish, French pâtés, Swedish candies, and jars of fancy English curds and jams that emptied a lot faster now that we were living with her. But that was the cool thing—well, one of the cool things—about my aunt Beth: she never made me or my mother feel like we were slumming. To her we were guests she couldn’t believe it was her good fortune to host. I knew she wanted me to work so I’d get out of the house—but in a good way.

“It’s the best way to meet people,” she said. “Haugland’s is right by the lake, and it’s swarming with kids in the summer.”

Excerpted from The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik Copyright © 2007 by Lorna Landvik. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.