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Breaking Clean
Breaking Clean
Author: Judy Blunt
In this extraordinary literary debut third-generation homesteader Judy Blunt describes her hardscrabble life on the prairies of eastern Montana in prose as big and bold as the landscape. — On a ranch miles from nowhere, Judy Blunt grew up with cattle and snakes, outhouse and isolation, epic blizzards and devastating prairie fires. She also grew u...  more »
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ISBN: 447267
Publication Date: 2/12/2002
Pages: 303
Rating:
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0 stars, based on 0 rating
Publisher: Knopf
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover
Reviews: Member | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

k9kutter64 avatar reviewed Breaking Clean on + 167 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
I found this book to be somewhat depressing......
Kittymama avatar reviewed Breaking Clean on + 107 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
I loved this book. It was fascinating to read about her life.

From Publishers Weekly
Poet and essayist Blunt grew up on a Montana cattle ranch in the 1950s and 60s, where "indoor plumbing" meant a door on the privy and "running water" was a fast ranch wife with two buckets. A natural tomboy, happiest around animals, Blunt dreaded leaving childhood. The gender rules of ranch life were unyielding: women married and kept to their kitchens, and they didn't own property or make decisions about the ranch. When puberty came, she did her best to hide all evidence of her sex, wearing a big coat and even lancing her growing breasts, the way she'd drain a cow's abscessed jaw. After finishing high school in town she returned to the family ranch, only to find she had no place of value there. So she accepted the inevitable: marriage to a man from a neighboring ranch. For 12 years Blunt lived in self-denial sneaking cigarettes, creeping into the calving shed to do the work she knew better than any man and bearing three children who were all she could call her own when she finally decided to leave.
reviewed Breaking Clean on + 91 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
I really liked this book. About a womans strength in a non traditional role as a farmer.
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reviewed Breaking Clean on + 6 more book reviews
A memoir of a country girl growing up in Montana to become a ranch wife and then to finally break free.
reviewed Breaking Clean on + 48 more book reviews
an interesting account of a woman's growing up on a Montana ranch, and gradually coming to challenge the narrow ideas of women's role in society; the ISBN on my copy of the book turns up as a hardback but it is actually a trade paperback


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