Cancelled Dreams by Darrell Robert McBreairty

Etched in vivid detail, journal entries written by a woman, who has returned to Maine's St. John River Valley, document her harrowing journey through a gauntlet of abuse, disappointment and cancelled dreams. Added to this novella are two stories containing a cast of characters whose struggles with sexual identity and grief lead us from the shores of the St. Lawrence River in the 19th Century to Portland Maine, in the 1980s.

Another story, set in Maine's St. John River Valley, contains a series of monologues, replete with raucous and often macabre humor, delivered by members of a community searching for answers in regard to the identity of a baby whose remains have been discovered in the walls of an old house by a demolition crew. "Dead Babies Tell No Lies" was chosen by Mary McCarthy as a finalist in the Maine Short Fiction Contest in 1987.