Up a Road Slowly

After her mother's death, seven year old Julie Trelling is sent to live in the countryside with her unmarried aunt Cordelia, a schoolteacher Julie initially experiences as cold and exacting, while her older brother Chris is sent off to boarding school and their household also includes their uncle Haskell, a charming but unreliable alcoholic who never manages to finish the novel he is always writing. The book follows Julie across roughly a decade, through ordinary and painful growing up, cruel classmates, a jealous rivalry with a cousin, her first crush on the wrong boy, a teacher who humiliates her in front of the class, and eventually a first real romance that also goes wrong before she is ready for the right one. Aunt Cordelia, whom Julie spends years resenting for her strictness, gradually reveals herself as the adult who has actually been protecting and shaping Julie all along, and by the time Julie is seventeen and preparing to leave for college, she recognizes how much of her own character, her stubbornness, her honesty, her ability to forgive Haskell's failures, came directly from the aunt she once thought had no warmth in her at all. The novel ends with Julie, older and steadier, understanding both her aunt and herself for the first time.

Reading it means moving through a decade at a measured, unhurried pace, closer to a series of connected memories than a plotted story, narrated by Julie herself looking back with more clarity than she had at the time. Some later critics have found Julie's growth almost too smooth and her setbacks too gently resolved, but the slow accumulation of ordinary incident, rather than any single crisis, is exactly what the book is built to deliver.