Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2360410 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 244 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The brutality and beauty of South Dakota ranch life suffuse this articulate memoir by award-winning western author Hasselstrom (Windbreak). Her difficult relationship with her stepfather, John, who adopted her in 1952 when she was nine, runs through the short pieces collected here. While her mother actively disliked ranching, Hasselstrom found it "like slipping my foot in a perfectly fitting soft boot." An eager pupil, she strove to please John, who taught her to ride, shoot, brand and castrate cattle; one day she even had to kill a sick steer. Strong and silent, John doled out large doses of tough love to his stepdaughter, once telling her that if she got into trouble at school, he would double her punishment. When she became a published writer, he refused to read her work and belittled all activities aside from ranching. Hasselstrom eventually returned to live and write on the ranch with her second husband, who died from cancer. Shortly after this loss, a close female friend revealed to Hasselstrom that she had been diagnosed with AIDS. At the same time, John's physical and mental health began to deteriorate. The author's stoicism in the face of these events began to crack after John ordered her to stop writing and work for him as a paid ranch laborer. Hasselstrom fled to Cheyenne, Wyo., where she found freedom but sorely missed her hardscrabble life. After John's death, Hasselstrom returned to the ranch to look after her mother and to reconnect with the landscape that has shaped her life. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The city mouse/country mouse scenario is played out before the reader's eyes in this collection of essays by award-winning author Hasselstrom (Windbreak). Transported as a girl from Rapid City, SD, to a ranch on the broad Western plain of Dakota Territory when her mother remarried, Hasselstrom became enraptured with her new lifestyle and her adoptive father's willingness to have her help him on the ranch. The essays follow Hasselstrom's growth into adulthood, as she struggles with her love of the hard work, the culture of male leadership, and change in herself and her relationships. Brief stints as a writer in the city allow her to draw contrasts with life on the Great Plains. With finely descriptive language, Hasselstrom brings the reader to the Dakota ranch to visualize its vastness and beauty, all the while reinforcing the personal dedication of the family that lives so closely to the land. Recommended for secondary schools and public and academic libraries.AJoyce Sparrow, Oldsmar Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A soulful memoir of prairie life. Name the heartbreak, and Linda Hasselstrom (Leaning Into The Wind, 1997, etc.) has faced it. Early on, her father, a taciturn and practical-minded Wyoming rancher, ordered her either to abandon her writing and take a $300-a-month job as a ranch hand, or get off the family spread and try her luck in the big city. Hasselstrom took the latter course, relocating to the prairie metropolis of Cheyenne and, as it turned out, eventually producing a distinguished body of essays and poems. In this memoir, Hasselstrom revisits her life on the ranch, a hard and unforgiving place where issues of life and death are never far away. In one chapter, she writes, for instance, of her pride at receiving a fine .22 rifle as a gift on her twelfth birthday, a gift that immediately had to be put to use against a sick steer and a family of barn-invading raccoons. One by one, they put their paws over their eyes, she writes. I groaned, but I shot them anyway. The epiphanies come fast and furious, as Hasselstrom faces the death of her second husband to cancer and the loss of her father, who, she discovers, had kept a memoir of his own, an archive apparently fated to have only one readerhis daughter. Having inherited the ranch from which she had been exiled, she closes her book by pondering whether she has any moral right to the land, inasmuch as she will have no children, has no intention of working the ranch, and has no real connection to it, for everyone who ties me to this place is subsiding into the land. Hasselstrom is a careful writer who reveals just enough of herself without falling into sentimentality, and her book is a healthy corrective for anyone who imagines that theres anything romantic about the cowboy way of life. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.