What is happening in Vermont now that new people are moving in and the old agrarian ways are dying THE SIMPLE LIFE is a deeply engaging rural trag edy about well-meaning ordinary people whose lives tangle with each other in a destructive way. The only true innocents are the team of oxen whose own story is one of the central threads. In 1991, Isabel Rawlings, a middle-aged suburbanite, recently divorced, moves to Severance, Vermont, to try to live a simple, rural life. She gets romantically involved with Leroy LaFourniere, a real estate developer and small-town hustler, and she makes friends with an old ox teamster, Sonny Trumbley, and his great granddaughter, Alison LePage. After a tragic farm accident, everything unravels, and Isabel realizes that the simple life isn't as simple as she had fantasized. The book has 427 pages and 36 black and white photographs of Vermont scenes taken by the author.