Tag Archives: The Cutters

“The Cutters” by Bess Streeter Aldrich is now available on cartridge and for download on BARD, the Braille and Audio Reading Download service. BARD is a service offered by the Nebraska Library Commission Talking Book and Braille Service and the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled at the Library of Congress.

All Unhappy families are alike, to invert Tolstoy, but each happy family is happy in its own way. Take the Cutters. Although they live in a rambling white house in a midwestern town called Meadows, the Cutters are too irreducibly real to stand in for the average all-American family created by pollsters, popular magazines, and television sitcoms. Witty Nell Cutter is not a Good Housekeeping model with lacquered hair. Big Ed Cutter is a lawyer not destined for Easy Street. There are three sons and a daughter-not the right number of children. Gramma, who lives with them, is inimitably Gramma. They compete for the reader’s attention, pursuing happiness in human ways that have not changed since 1926, when The Cutters was first published. But it is Nell Cutter who best illustrates Bess Streeter Aldrich’s strength in drawing memorable characters. Whether she is decorating the house on a budget for wealthy guests or testing child-raising theories or trying to make the daily loaf a little more yeasty. Nell Cutter is not afraid to experiment. She may go out on a limb, but it is seldom a dead one.

“The Cutters is well conceived and written. It is piched in a light, pleasant key and…comes as a welcome relief from adventure yarns and tales of mooncalf love. “

— Literary Review

TBBS borrowers can request “The Cutters,” DCB02017 or download it from the National Library Service BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download) website. If you have high-speed internet access, you can download books to your smartphone or tablet, or onto a flash drive for use with your player. You may also contact your reader’s advisor to have the book mailed to you on cartridge.