On Brassard’s Farm

Voice actor Flanagan’s solid performance adds heart to the audio edition of Hecht’s novel about a Boston teacher who impulsively purchases a tract of land in Vermont and leaves the city behind to live there. While the novel’s structure leaves no doubt that Ann Turner will be positively changed by her environment—and the backbreaking daily work that accompanies rural living, the audio performance guides listeners into believing the transformation is authentic and not just inevitable. Flanagan does an outstanding job of making this character realistic—Ann is sympathetic and intelligent on one hand and dangerously thoughtless and impulsive on the other. In Flanagan’s capable hands, most of the other characters also come to life, including the couple who sells her the land and then hires her to work on their own dairy farm, and their quiet but attentive friend, Ernest. One hiccup is in the brief portrayal of Ann’s “trailer” neighbors, who are bizarrely voiced with a near-Southern accent that feels out of place in rural Vermont. Despite that minor flaw, Flanagan treats the novel’s main characters with sensitivity. [em]A Blackstone hardcover. (Apr.) [/em]