Product Details

• Published on: 2007-12-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Richman's first novel offers a curious and satisfying blend of longing, political criticism and a middle-aged woman's sudden realization that she has been pretending all her life. Dickie Sinfield, 52, spent her childhood on a hardscrabble Utah cattle ranch, after her father uprooted her and her siblings from the suburbs and forced her to become a cowgirl at age seven. Fleeing at 18, Dickie never married and has been a Salt Lake City newspaper reporter for 25 years, all the while denying her love for her family and for childhood neighbor boy Stumpy Nelson. When Dickie's brother, Heber, is killed by poison gas in an accident at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Grounds, Dickie comes home for the funeral. There, she face her father's anger and bitterness, her mother's infidelity, her best friend's betrayal—and her own life. Amid Dickie's personal angst and gradual self-discovery, Richman unloads heaping criticism on the federal government's handling of chemical weapons and its treatment of civilian accident victims. Author of the memoir Riding in the Shadows of Saints: A Woman's Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail, Richman delivers a warm story of good folks who make bad decisions, justify them and then have to live with the consequences. (Jan.)
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Review
" Engrossing. The narrative touches on complexities and contradictions that touch so many lives: steadfast patriotism vs. threatening governmental action; urban Mormonism vs. its earthier rural equivalent; and people vs. a past that can leave them with heavy baggage. With lovely specificity, Richman manages to tell a true Utah story." (Salt Lake City Weekly, 2008 ARTYS Awards (Winner, Best Fiction Book) )

"Readers will be irrevocably drawn into this top-notch fictional debut from an amazing new talent." (Booklist )

"Richman's mastery of the emotional geography is illuminating and call(s) to mind the work of Pat Conroy." (Kirkus Reviews )

"A warm story of good folks who make bad decisions and then have to live with them." (Publishers Weekly )

"Rich characterizations and vivid sense of place. One of the year's finest works of local fiction." (Salt Lake City Weekly )