Local author Firth Haring Fabend

Land So Fair is a historical novel/family saga set in Rockland County during the eighteenth century, with flashbacks to the Dutch colony of New Netherland. In her discussion, "The Land of Milk and Honey and What Happened to It", she paints a picture of how Piermont might have looked when Henry Hudson sailed past in 1609 and how it could have appeared to George Washington when he met Sir Guy Carleton at Tappan Slote and traveled to Tappan for their historic meeting at the DeWint House in 1783. In the process, she describes how the area was changed irrevocably by the years of the Revolution.

The book is an outgrowth of Ms. Fabend's historical poem A Catch of Grandmothers (2004), which was in turn based on an earlier books A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660-1800 (1991), a history of the first five generations of the Haring Family in New York and New Jersey. It is a "hybrid of fiction and fact, but the basic biographical details about the main characters are accurate," she writes.