Kendra Atleework

I love memoirs of place. It fascinates me to see what pulls people, connecting them to a land that shaped them, the land they forever carry within. I have my own place like that, a place my old Geology professor called "la querencia," roughly translated as "place of my heart." So I will forever be attracted to books that try to explore these landscapes, combining memoir, nature writing, and history. Kendra Atleework's Miracle Country promised to be a book that would be exactly that, instead I struggled mightily through it, never connecting, never interested enough to keep going but for my compulsion to finish all books I start.

Atleework grew up in the forbidding landscape of Owens Valley, in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It is an arid, unforgiving place prone to drought and wild fires, especially given the effects of climate change. But there is a beauty in the land as well and it holds the history of both her happy family and the devastating loss of her mother when Atleework was just 16. She writes the personal story of her family and the story of the Native people who preceded her family in the area; she addresses California land and water rights, the devastation that people are wreaking, and the environmental history of the area as well. Even when she moved far from Swall Meadows, she carried the place deep within her, eventually realizing that she has to return to the place that formed her and confront both its past and future as well as her own.

The writing here is very stream of consciousness and meanders far and wide. This is problematic since there is no strong through narrative keeping the writing focused, or at least reining it in from the many digressions. The lack of focus also allows the reader (or at least this reader) to mentally wander off as well. There are strange, impenetrable metaphors that feel forced: "In a dangerous world, the sustained desire of our mother's life was a bag of marbles she could hand to lost boys, to her son and daughters--to impart to us some design that might teach us care and yet let joy master fear. Those marbles were, all along, a token meant to tell us we could always come home." (p. 120) The different pieces of the narrative, the personal, the historical, and the environmental are uncomfortably mashed together rather than flowing organically, resulting in an occasionally jarring reading experience. That the whole thing is also non-linear adds to the discombobulation and disconnectedness of the reader. I know there must have been a kernel of what attracted me to the book in the first place somewhere in there but I ultimately wasn't interested enough to turn over enough desert stones to find it. There do seem to be quite a few people who rave about the book so perhaps it's a me problem rather than a book problem.

Thank you to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for a copy of this book to review.… (más)

I grew up on the outskirts of Michigan's capital city, Lansing, in the 1960s and 70s. After college I moved away and lived the "big city" life for much of my adulthood - in Denver, and New York at first, then, and mostly, in Chicago and the Chicagoland area.

But always throughout my life there was a returning. Not to Lansing, but to a place farther back in my family's history, a place that I have visited all my life - Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula (aka the UP). After leaving the working world my husband and I have relocated back to my paternal grandmother's hometown in the UP, to a house on a lake where my family has held property for three generations before me. This is now, and has always felt to me, like my home place.

I am telling you all of this because it's inspired by my reading of Kendra Atleework's amazing debut, her memoir Miracle Country. She writes beautifully of her home place, the Owens Valley in California's Sierra Nevadas, and of its history and the history of the state of California, and of the life of her family, and the loss of her mother when Kendra was only 16.

Her book is a superbly literary and lyrical work of creative nonfiction. Her use of language is stunningly good for a debut work, and carries the reader effortlessly through the changing focus of her story. Subjects range from the tragedy of Indian removal, the drought that threatens California's water supply, the removal of water from the Owens Valley for the sake of Los Angelenos (the greatest good for the greatest number is a recurring theme), wildfires coming down the mountains, the loss of her mother and the resulting crumbling apart of her family, her father's many careers, the eventual resolution of family matters, and her own return back home.

The California desert, the Owens Valley and the Sierra Nevadas are as much a part of her narrative as any of the characters she introduces us to. Like the region I live in now, as viewed by those outside, her home place has it's best days behind it. And yet she returns to it because she loves the area and its people. Like her father, who she says insists on going around with holes in his jeans (which would never do in the big city) and her brother, who doesn't travel far from home on the excuse that he needs to care for his dog, she realizes that she too has too much of the land in her to leave it for too long.

The miracle country of the book's title then is the Owens Valley of California. And yet, there is something in her evocation of place that is universal. I too have felt the tug of a different life from the midst of my big city surroundings, and have returned to my own home place.

Your own idea of a home place may be tied less to geography than to family or friends. Maybe you too have returned to your home place. But if not, I hope maybe one day you will.

Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ for Miracle Country. I checked out the audiobook from my local library on the Libby app. The narrator, Cassandra Campbell, did an excellent job. Campbell is a prolific audiobook narrator, the voice behind works like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Where the Crawdads Sing.… (más)