Millennial Avah Lavoie’s crumbling relationship is the final push she needs to answer her estranged mother’s unexpected call: her great-grandfather Opa has died. Driving north to rural Vermont, Avah hopes to untangle the murky history of a family she barely knows. Rumors swirl—about a long-lost farm, a sawmill accident, and Opa’s drinking. As a snowstorm closes in, complications escalate. A neighbor wants to buy Opa’s house and flip the lakefront land for profit. Trina, the neighbor’s sharp-tongued housekeeper, offers rides, coffee, and companionship—but she has her own motives. When Avah tracks down her mother, holed up on a bender at the Blue Lion Motel, she catches a glimpse of the girl her mother once was: motherless, broken, still searching. Avah can’t forgive decades of drinking—but empathy stirs.

Call It Madness unfolds in the immensity of a frozen Vermont winter, where buried truths rise and endings refuse to follow the script.

Praise for Call It Madness

“With striking, deliberate prose, Brett Stanciu offers a harrowing tale for our times. Caught between the grindstones of poverty and addiction, her people are battered and fragmented yet hold tightly the better flickers of the human heart. At turns caustic and darkly comic, Call It Madness never loses sight of the decay within the veneers of social respectability, and how slender the chasm is between hope and despair. A haunting and visceral novel.”

—Jeffrey Lent, author of A Slant of Light and In the Fall

“Feisty, likeable Avah returns to Vermont to recover missing parts of her fractured past. There is not a dull sentence in the book.”

—Kathryn Kramer, author of Sweet Water, Rattlesnake Farming and Missing History: The Covert Education of a Child of the Great Books

“In Call It Madness, Brett Stanciu continues to write with the same ruthless honesty that made Hidden View so compelling. Avah Lavoie is living at the edges of a drug-fueled life as she begins her search in rural northern Vermont for the family connections that will give her life meaning. She sometimes sleeps in her car ('the Nugget'), is often cold, and is always hungry. Her search for the truth is relentless and acutely, physically felt. I longed to give her a hearty sandwich and make her sit down and eat the whole thing.”

—Mary Hays, author of Learning to Drive

“With Brett Ann Stanciu’s latest novel, Call It Madness, the reader rides along with Avah, a young woman setting out on a bumpy and searching journey to points unknown as she struggles to answer questions about where she’s come from, where she’s headed, who is family, and where ever was or could be home anyway? Like a classic paper road atlas, the pages of Call It Madness are filled with rich details, possibility, and interconnected landscapes, and by ‘The End’ on the last page the reader finds all roads lead to a kind of ‘You Are Here,’ where Avah lands intact and the reader looks back on her colorful road trip of constant discovery.”

—Mary Elder Jacobsen, author of Stonechat: Poems

“In Call It Madness, Brett Stanciu pulls the reader into a kind of alternate universe: the chaotic life of twenty-five-year-old Avah. She may be smart, observant, capable of generosity, but Avah is most interested in finding the next drink, the next high that will dull the memories of growing up with a drug-addicted mother stewing in her own grievances. Drawing on the extensive research for Unstitched, her nonfiction chronicle of substance abuse in a small Vermont community, Stanciu creates a visceral portrait of a young life unraveling. The one saving grace is Avah’s memory of spending a week with her great-grandfather in his house by a Vermont lake when she was a small child, a vision of Paradise she clings to and yearns toward, even as she seems bent on falling deeper into her personal Hell. Stanciu writes with biting honesty and, in fleeting moments of hope, with transcendent prose that glistens like sunlight on lake water—the way it appeared to a child seeing it for the first time.”

—Catherine Tudish, author of American Cream

“Call It Madness is a stunning and heartbreaking novel about the tangle of family and small-town Vermont life in all its rural desperation and splendor. Stanciu shows us the powerful complexity and contractions of family, poverty, and addiction. Stanciu leaves readers hungry for more.”

—Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey and Crosscut