Helpful Score: 10
First I must fess up that Gloss gets extra points here because of the locale of the story. She has claimed northeast Oregon as her stomping grounds, inventing Elwha County from the wheat lands and foothills of the region just as deftly as Faulkner invented and claimed Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. More important, she gets it right, and grants this reader multiple little thrills of recognition throughout the narrative.
That said, you dont have to know Canyon City from the Grand Canyon to relish this honest tale of a young woman choosing her own way in WWI-era Oregon. Martha Lessen casts off from her Pendleton home, determined to make her own way in an amalgam of youthful fantasies of a West that never was, mingled with a set of real-life skills in horse-taming that runs counter to the rope-em-and-bust-em philosophy of the era.
Along the way, she meets and becomes part of the lives of various small ranchers and wheat farmers in this still-raw country where aging homesteaders and the adult children of homesteaders mingle uneasily with newcomers trying and sometimes failing to bend the land to their will.
Gloss writes like shes the love-child of Sandra Dallas and Cormac McCarthy, with a spare and open style and a clear understanding of the hearts of her characters two-footed as well as four-footed. The majority of them are beautifully and realistically drawn, and even the horses become individuals, without falling into Disneyesque anthropomorphism.
Elwha County is a place you want to visit, and the only quibble I have with the book is that Gloss seems reluctant to leave it, as the last couple of chapters seem superfluous and are definitely anticlimactic.
Overall, this quickly-read novel is as welcoming as a warm kitchen on a winter day, and almost as hard to leave.
That said, you dont have to know Canyon City from the Grand Canyon to relish this honest tale of a young woman choosing her own way in WWI-era Oregon. Martha Lessen casts off from her Pendleton home, determined to make her own way in an amalgam of youthful fantasies of a West that never was, mingled with a set of real-life skills in horse-taming that runs counter to the rope-em-and-bust-em philosophy of the era.
Along the way, she meets and becomes part of the lives of various small ranchers and wheat farmers in this still-raw country where aging homesteaders and the adult children of homesteaders mingle uneasily with newcomers trying and sometimes failing to bend the land to their will.
Gloss writes like shes the love-child of Sandra Dallas and Cormac McCarthy, with a spare and open style and a clear understanding of the hearts of her characters two-footed as well as four-footed. The majority of them are beautifully and realistically drawn, and even the horses become individuals, without falling into Disneyesque anthropomorphism.
Elwha County is a place you want to visit, and the only quibble I have with the book is that Gloss seems reluctant to leave it, as the last couple of chapters seem superfluous and are definitely anticlimactic.
Overall, this quickly-read novel is as welcoming as a warm kitchen on a winter day, and almost as hard to leave.
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