Finished: Ethan Frome (Wharton) Well, that was short and sweet tragic! This has long been on my list to read, and I was surprised that it was such a page-turner for me. I really got drawn into the story and wanted to know what happened. I didn't realize that my book had Ethan Frome AND other stories, so I was thinking I was only about halfway done when the book ended. I guess there was really no other place for it to go though! If I had to summarize this book in one sentence it would be...Women can be such manipulative witches and stupid men are just ripe for their picking. As we begin, Ethan Frome is a 52 year old poor New England farmer who has lived for 24 years disfigured and in pain due to an accident he caused because he saw no way out of a tragic situation. As a 28 year old man, he is trapped in a loveless, hurried, now 7 year old marriage with an older woman, Zeena, who has become more and more of a self-anointed invalid. When her younger cousin, Mattie, comes to help with the housework, Mattie and the quiet Ethan bond over the year and without knowing how the other feels, fall in love with each other. Things come to a head when Zeena makes an overnight trip to a new doctor and Mattie and Ethan have a "normal" quiet dinner and evening together and see how life could be for them. They don't even kiss or confess their feelings, but know they are in love. I suppose that Zeena had some inkling all along because when she comes back she tells Ethan that the doctor says she's worse than she feared, and she has hired a new full-time nursemaid and that Mattie will have to go back to some other relative the very next day. As Ethan drives Mattie to the train station in the horse cart, they go by the big snowy hill they've always promised they would sled down together. On a whim, as the sun is setting and the trees are obscured by the dusk, they take a dangerous but thrilling sled ride down the big hill. They embrace each other at the end and declare they can't live without each other. Mattie convinces Ethan to take her down the hill again and this time run them both purposely into a tree to end their misery. At least they'll go out together. Ethan does so, and finally having kissed Mattie, they fling themselves down towards their destiny. They do, in fact, hit a tree, but both of them survive. Ethan is disfigured on one side for life...and Mattie is paralyzed from the neck down. The author leads you to believe that Mattie won't survive this ordeal, and at the end we find out that Zeena took them both back in at the farm and suddenly wasn't ill any more. That's where the manipulative witch part comes in...I guess she never was! She has cared for them for 20 years where they still live today, an unhappy trio, Mattie and Ethan mere shadows of their former selves. Depressing huh?