It was a clear, bright Sunday morning-a perfect day for the first cut of the season. All the kids along Sweet Milk Road knew the species names they were weaned on the sweat of haying, and my mother and her brother Morgan were no different. By May, the fields rippled with thigh deep, green-gold grasses: sweet timothy, alfalfa, birdsfoot trefoil, clovers, reed canarygrass, ryegrass, and tall fescue.

Spring had come to the Northeast nearly a season ahead of itself. It was 1965, the year before she married my father. Not long before my mother died, she told me a story I’d never heard before. Joss must make her own choices and, ultimately, let go.Rich with beautiful language and immersed in powerful descriptions of Joss’s feelings, Stony Kill tells a powerful story of the heartbreak and suffering from violent acts of a dysfunctional family, and ultimately her hope and choice of a better life. As the past seeps in through the rich farmland and the landscape of the treacherous, churning Stony Kill, Piecing together the broken past and her family’s dysfunction, the dark secrets of a family submerged in a history of violence and regret begin to take shape, and the reality of two brutal killings can no longer be denied. But when she flees to the country farm of her childhood in upstate New York, will she finally find the truth of dark events in her family’s past? Or will all that she has held at bay for twenty years come crashing down? As Joss comes to terms with her loss, she is forced to confront memories of a childhood steeped in both joy and sorrow.

After the sudden death of her mother, Joss Ryckman finds herself running away from everything-the life she did not choose of managing the family bakery in Brooklyn, the troubled relationship with her sometimes violent father, and her conflicts with Wyatt, a lover who always wants more.

Stony Kill by Marie White Small