Check this Out - A New Book by Anita Diamant

Since The Red Tent is such a popular book with this crowd, I thought I'd share a recent discovery - that author Anita Diamant is releasing a new novel in September (i.e. THURSDAY). Here's some stuff I pulled from her website about it. (IN HER WORDS!)
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THE LAST DAYS OF DOGTOWN is set in the early 1800s in rural Massachusetts. In it, I set out to imagine the lives of people who have been left out of history: the poor, widows and spinsters, orphans, New England Africans - both enslaved and free. Marginal and voiceless, these folks fascinate me because so little is known about them. As in THE RED TENT, their silence gives me permission to imagine an entire world of longing and loss, of laughter and hope.
This is a character-driven book, populated by people who might be called "eccentric," which happens to be a term applied to the large boulders strewn by the last ice age over the rocky outcrop of Cape Ann.

My research for this book included reading up on 19th century dentistry, studying drawings of ladies' underwear and shoes of the period, searching out maps of the era, and tramping the terrain, where almost nothing is left of the houses and fields of those early residents. The most vivid evidence of the Commons Settlement, as Dogtown was originally known, are the remnants of stone walls, which still line rarely traveled roads and set the boundaries around long-abandoned fields and farms.