From the first word, Marquart (The Hunger Bone
) makes clear that she's got some reckoning to do with her home place, damning horny farmboys and the "seeds" they plant in the first paragraph of this rich memoir of growing up on a North Dakota farm. She got out as soon as she could, looking back only years later when her father's death pulls her home. Marquart explores her childhood as a victim of endless chores (wryly noting the word chores is "always plural") and isolation that was unbearable, especially for a contact-hungry teen. Everything Marquart touches gains light and color, from the monotony of the work and the tactics she developed to avoid it to the land itself and the untold price her foremothers paid to settle it. All of her narrative's wanderlust, however, brings her back to her father, sowing insight into his respect for her pursuit of a different life and her growing connection to how he lived his. (Aug.)
