Millennial Avah Lavoie' s crumbling relationship is the final push she needs to answer her estranged mother' s unexpected call: her great-grandfather Opa has died. Driving north to rural Vermont, Avah hopes to untangle the murky history of a family she barely knows. Rumors swirl- about a long-lost farm, a sawmill accident, and Opa' s drinking. As a snowstorm closes in, complications escalate. A neighbor wants to buy Opa' s house and flip the lakefront land for profit. Trina, the neighbor' s sharp-tongued housekeeper, offers rides, coffee, and companionship- but she has her own motives. When Avah tracks down her mother, holed up on a bender at the Blue Lion Motel, she catches a glimpse of the girl her mother once was: motherless, broken, still searching. Avah can' t forgive decades of drinking- but empathy stirs. Call It Madness unfolds in the immensity of a frozen Vermont winter, where buried truths rise and endings refuse to follow the script.
"With striking, deliberate prose, Brett Stanciu offers a harrowing tale for our times. Caught between the grindstones of poverty and addiction, her people are battered and fragmented yet hold tightly the better flickers of the human heart. At turns caustic and darkly comic, Call It Madness never loses sight of the decay within the veneers of social respectability, and how slender the chasm is between hope and despair. A haunting and visceral novel."
Jeffrey Lent, author of A Slant of Light and In the Fall
"In Call It Madness, Brett Stanciu continues to write with the same ruthless honesty that made Hidden View so compelling. Avah Lavoie is living at the edges of a drug-fueled life as she begins her search in rural northern Vermont for the family connections that will give her life meaning. She sometimes sleeps in her car ("the Nugget"), is often cold, and is always hungry. Her search for the truth is relentless and acutely, physically felt. I longed to give her a hearty sandwich and make her sit down and eat the whole thing. "
