FICTION: Sweet Adeline

The Story* coils and burrows under the green acres of Jalna, where the Whiteoaks live, in Ontario. The characters at the beginning are all Whiteoaks; there is Adeline, an old, crude, arrogant woman who wants to be 100 years old; her sons, Ernest and Nicholas, one of them over 70; Renny, present owner of Jalna, Adeline's grandson by another father; Renny has four brothers, Eden, 23, Piers, Finch, Wakefield, 9, and one sister, Meg, about 40.

Eden, the limberest sheep in the flock, wrote poetry that, unlike the poetry of most fictional characters, remains wisely unquoted in the book though it...

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