Book review by Jane
I get a lot of selfish pleasure from reading, and this book brought a great deal of pleasure to me. I couldn’t help but compare the main character to my own grandmother, who was born just a few years later and had quite a bit of character herself, although not the chance to work a ranch. At any rate, I could hear her voice occasionally coming out of the main character, Lily. I absolutely loved the conversational tone of this story written in first person. Lily explained herself and others in such terms that you couldn’t argue with her thinking, whether you agreed with it or not. She was a very tough-and-tumble kind of person, in many respects. She was able to work hard for what she wanted to do, but she also knew when to accept her fate and work with what she had. I thought that was a lesson that most people really need to realize—getting the most out of what you have. The story is about Lily’s life, so the setting changes throughout the book as she moves through her life, but she is a western lady. The story touches on a lesson I had to learn as a parent, that sometimes the lessons you teach end up being completely different lessons to the child, which is something Lily’s daughter, Rosemary said to her. While there is some drama in the covers of this book, there is also a lot of action. I think it was most enjoyable because there was such a mixture.

In a note at the end of the book, the author said she had wanted to write about her own mother’s childhood, but her mother convinced her that the grandmother was a person with an extraordinary story to tell. Jeannette could not collect the information straight from her grandmother since she died when the author was a child. The author said she tells the story as a storyteller would tell an oral history. So this book can’t go into the Biography section of the Web site. The cover states it is a “True Life Novel”. Anyway, before this book, the author wroteThe Glass Castle: A Memoir, which I would like to read.

Jane.