Helpful Score: 1
Beautifully written, low-key, with the truthfulness of life itself.
Molly Gloss excels at stories of life on the edge: one of my very favorite novels is "The Dazzle of Day," her beautifully written, low-key and truthful story of a group of Quakers who flee political and ecological chaos on Earth in a generation starship headed for a distant star. "The Jump-Off Creek" reverses the polarity of Gloss' imaginative time-machine, and recreates world of the 1890s Oregon frontier, and the life of Lydia Sanderson, a young widow who has sold up all the baggage of her unhappy marriage and bought a smallholding in Oregon, with little more ambition than, for the first time in her life being her own boss, and keeping body and soul together.
Encounters with her neighbours -- fellow smallholders, scraping a living from the land during a depression that is adding to the general struggle to survive, their wives, who raise and bury children, and long for brief opportunities for female companionship, and "wolfers," embittered young cowboys who scrape a living from the bounty they receive for killing the wolves that prey on cattle and sheep -- build up to a narrative of her first year in her new home on the Jump-off Creek.
I can't think of any way to put it better than the late, Blessed Ursula Le Guin, who described it as " ... the West behind the swaggering and hokum." A marvellous story of the quiet courage that went into the settling of America.
Molly Gloss excels at stories of life on the edge: one of my very favorite novels is "The Dazzle of Day," her beautifully written, low-key and truthful story of a group of Quakers who flee political and ecological chaos on Earth in a generation starship headed for a distant star. "The Jump-Off Creek" reverses the polarity of Gloss' imaginative time-machine, and recreates world of the 1890s Oregon frontier, and the life of Lydia Sanderson, a young widow who has sold up all the baggage of her unhappy marriage and bought a smallholding in Oregon, with little more ambition than, for the first time in her life being her own boss, and keeping body and soul together.
Encounters with her neighbours -- fellow smallholders, scraping a living from the land during a depression that is adding to the general struggle to survive, their wives, who raise and bury children, and long for brief opportunities for female companionship, and "wolfers," embittered young cowboys who scrape a living from the bounty they receive for killing the wolves that prey on cattle and sheep -- build up to a narrative of her first year in her new home on the Jump-off Creek.
I can't think of any way to put it better than the late, Blessed Ursula Le Guin, who described it as " ... the West behind the swaggering and hokum." A marvellous story of the quiet courage that went into the settling of America.
Back to all reviews by this member
Back to all reviews of this book
Back to Book Reviews
Back to Book Details
Back to all reviews of this book
Back to Book Reviews
Back to Book Details
