Mary Webb's "Precious Bane" -- what can I tell you about it, except I found it on my mother's bookshelf as a teenager and could not open it at any page, then or later, without going on to the end. It cast that kind of a spell, like an old ballad, rare and lovely and true and on the knife edge of "corniness" . . . And I loved introducing it to my teenage daughters, i.e., their reading the book aloud to me on a long interstate highway trip between Huntington WV and Pittsburgh PA, the kind of driving I hate, but this trip I wanted to go on and on or at least until we got to the 'raising of Venus' . . . Î so wanted to hear their reaction to it; instead one of them piped up with "Mother, why are we only going 35 mph?"
Read this book under (or in) an apple tree or perhaps in a meadow . . .   
          robinia