Resumen
Resumen de Canteras de Flamsted
Para quién es
Readers who love stories of small towns, immigrant newcomers and family secrets will find a home here. It suits anyone drawn to a spirited orphan heroine, a wise priest, and a young man's tangled ambitions.
De qué trata este libro
Flamsted Quarries is a novel by Mary E. Waller, an American writer who died in 1938. It follows a small Maine town that is changed forever when granite is found in its sheep pastures. Railroads, stonecutting sheds and shiploads of immigrants arrive, and with them come the questions of what a person owes to neighbors, to family and to money.
The story begins in New York, in a vaudeville theater where a child sings a hymn and moves three men in the audience. One is a French-born priest who wants to rescue her. One is a rich financier. One is a college student who loves a fast, comfortable life. Years later their paths cross again in Flamsted, where the child, Aileen Armagh, grows up in the house of a hard and wealthy old woman.
The book gives you a lively cast: a talkative colonel, a loyal handyman, a proud mother, a mischievous orphan girl and an Italian fruit seller. It also gives you a closer look at American small-town life around the turn of the twentieth century, with its feuds, its machines and its hopes. Let us begin where the book begins, in the dark of a New York theater, with a child and a song.
En este resumen
- 1A child's song stirs three listenersFree
- 2Two orphans find a Marchioness across the street
- 3A priest and an orphan arrive in Flamsted
- 4Aurora Googe stakes everything on her son
- 5Six years change the town and its people
- 6Love and pride collide at the lily-pad reach
- 7A treasurer chases wealth until it breaks him
- 8What the novel says about money, love and strangers
- 9How the author tells it, with song, stone and stream
Idea clave 1 de 9
A child's song stirs three listeners
The novel opens in a New York vaudeville house. A small girl called the Little Patti plays a match girl in a snowy street scene and sings The Holy City to a gallery that roars its approval. Backstage, she throws a tantrum, because the man who sent her flowers is in a box again and she wants to sing him a quieter song. Her real name is Aileen Armagh, and she is about to change three lives.
She returns to the footlights and sings There Is a Green Hill Far Away. The noisy house falls silent. A woman sobs, and a rough gallery fan jams a wool cap into the mouth of a man who means to hiss. The author tells us that a simple song can reach people whose lives run in opposite directions.
The first listener is a college student named Champney Googe, who slips out into the lobby and bumps into two men. One is the gentleman who gave the child her roses. The other is a priest in plain clothes. The student sneers a little, as young men do when they feel stirred and do not want to show it.
The priest is Father John Francis Honoré, and the next chapter gives us his story. He walks two miles to the Battery and leans on the sea wall, remembering his childhood in the French region of Auvergne and a bakery in Dieppe, where a little girl called Little Trout once stood beside him. He remembers crossing the sea as a boy, mill work on the Merrimac River, and the death of his parents. He also remembers a crime in his youth that has driven him to serve others ever since.
The third listener is the gentleman in the box, Henry Van Ostend, a financier whose wife loved the hymn. By the end of the first chapters, each man has a reason to think about the girl. The priest decides to see whether she is being used by the theater. That choice sets the whole story in motion.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Canteras de Flamsted
What is Flamsted Quarries about?
It follows a Maine town changed by a granite quarry, and the orphan Aileen Armagh, the ambitious Champney Googe and the priest Father Honoré, whose lives meet again and again between New York and Flamsted over about twenty years.
Who is Aileen Armagh in Flamsted Quarries?
She is an Irish-born orphan and former child singer who is sent from a New York asylum to live at Champ-au-Haut in Flamsted. She is lively, loyal, quick-witted and deeply musical, and she is the heart of the story.
Is Flamsted Quarries a true story?
No, it is a novel by Mary E. Waller, set mostly in a fictional Maine town. It draws on real conditions of the granite industry and immigration around 1900, which gives the setting a believable feel.
Is Flamsted Quarries easy to read?
It has lively dialogue, short scenes and a warm narrator who explains the setting as she goes. The characters speak in colorful local ways, and the plot moves between comic episodes and emotional turns that keep you reading.
What is the main message of Flamsted Quarries?
The book suggests that honest work, loyal love and welcome for strangers matter more than wealth, and that a person who fails can still rebuild a good life through humility, service and the support of a community.