The Grafton Public Library presents… A Voice of Conviction: Mildred Walker (Schemm) Home - Hours - Book Chat Room - Calendar - Reference - Contact Us

Book	Author	Dewey Number	Description
The Quarry	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAL	Set in a Vermont village (Grafton) and spanning the time period from the Civil War to WWI, this historical novel centers on the friendship between soapstone quarry owner Lyman Converse and escaped slave Easy Williams, which spans years of economic and social change.
The Southwest Corner	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAL	Set in a Vermont village (Grafton) eighty-three year old Marcia Elder feels she needs help to remain in her home. A companion is found, but everything does not work out as planned. Elder won’t give up, however.
A Piece of the World	Walker, Mildred	JUV FIC WAL	Walker’s only juvenile title is set in a Vermont village (Grafton) and features a young girl whose parents have divorced and sent her to stay with her grandmother for the summer. She discovers a large boulder in the woods (Serpentine Rock) and becomes involved in events and friendships revolving around the unusual rock.
If A Lion Could Talk	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAL	Walker examines the psychological changes wrought upon missionaries sent to convert Blackfoot Indians to Christianity in pre-Civil War Missouri who are themselves forever altered by “Wilderness”.
The Brewers’ Big Horses	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAL	Set in the Midwest, this novel features a young woman with a “proud name” who crosses to the other side of town to marry an immigrant and the son of a brewer.
The Body of a Young Man	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAL	James Cutler, a high school physics teacher, is shattered by the suicide of his most promising student. Hoping to gain perspective and peace of mind, he travels with his wife, Phyllis, to Vermont to spend the summer.
Dr. Norton’s Wife	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAR	Dr. Norton’s Wife was praised when it was first published in 1938 as a portrait of a marriage subjected to the strain of unexpected invalidism. As a doctor’s wife, Sue Norton is no stranger to matters of life and death. But medical shoptalk screens her from the realities of illness until she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Never clinical, Walker, herself the wife of a doctor, accurately describes the disease’s progress and the adjustments necessary to cope with it. The result is a tender story of “the marriage of true minds.
The Curlew’s Cry	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAR	The Curlew's Cry is the story of three decades in the life of Pamela Lacey and a Montana town. Descended from pioneers and the daughter of a rancher, Pamela lives according to her own script, and nothing seems to happen as expected. The world beats on—World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1917, the Great Depression—and local fortune rise and fall with the price of beef. For Pamela the fight that counts is defined by a sense of independence and pervasive loneliness, by the twists and turns of love and friendship.
Medical Meeting	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAR	Dr. Henry Baker and his wife, Liz, have spent twelve years developing a cure for tuberculosis. Working at a lab in their home, they have persisted without adequate funding and assistance, sacrificing new clothes and vacations to make their contribution to humanity.
Winter Wheat	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAR	Ellen Webb lives in the dryland wheat country of central Montana during the early 1940s. “This is a story about growing up, becoming a woman, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, within the space of a year and a half. But what a year and a half it is!"
Unless The Wind Turns	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAR	John Davis has a “dull aching sense of missing out, of not getting anywhere.” There must be millions like him, he thinks. His relations with his wife, Serena, are shallow and unsatisfying. In the late 1930s, he tries to rekindle their marriage by bringing her to a special place from his past—the Montana mountains. He is chagrined when she asks other people to join them on the camping trip. Plans are further disrupted by a catastrophe—a forest fire that rages uncontrolled for three days. Forced to reach outward to others in this crisis, the members of the party ultimately have to face themselves as well. Unless the Wind Turns is fast-moving and psychologically nuanced.
The Orange Tree	Walker, Mildred	FIC WAR	The novel centers on two families living in Boston in the 1970s: an older couple, Tiresa and Paulo Romano, and the newlyweds Olive and Ron Fifer. The fragile state of the older woman’s health and the younger woman’s marriage brings these two couples together in their separate and quietly desperate isolation, producing a combination of insight and compassion that only the finest story can evoke.
Writing For Her Life	Hugo, Ripley	92 WAL	Drawing on family memories, letters, diaries, reviews, and, in particular, the notebooks that Walker kept for each novel, Hugo fashions an absorbing account of how her mother’s characters emerged in the landscapes that she visited again and again: Vermont, the Midwest, and, most frequently, Montana. Hugo (Mildred’s daughter) shows us the proper mother and social creature as carefully and consciously crafted; between the two portrayals, we glimpse the depths of a life thus divided.