Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still
Colorado Book Award
Mountain and Plains Booksellers Award
Mattie Remmel, mid-forties, and her husband Haney have come west from Maine to run a family alfalfa ranch near the Black Hills in South Dakota. Early on, Haney dies in a truck accident on the property, and Mattie calls her daughter, Shelley, to come home from college. Shelley knows little about farming—Haney made sure she didn’t—so Mattie puts an ad in the local paper for a hired man. One person answers the ad—Dawn, a young woman who, in the military learned how to fix machines. As well, a runaway Native American boy, Elton, shows up in Mattie’s barn. Each of the women has a point of view, and together with Elton, they form a new family on the land. Kent Nelson crafts a complicated narrative involving threats from neighbors and a surprise intrusion from the past. Landscape is carefully and beautifully described and becomes a full-on force that both limits the characters and frees them to be who they are and want to become.
“An Upland Plover flew from one fencepost to another, rattling its complaint at her intrusion, but Mattie kept her eye on the hawks. They wove a pattern of random circles around each other in the air, coiling and uncoiling with such ease Mattie felt the palpable magnetism of their movement. Their numbers grew: she couldn’t count how many there were, and she stopped and let the moment enter her body.”
“The bleak landscape of South Dakota comes alive in this absorbing novel, the affecting tale of three women at life’s crossroads... Nelson (Language in the Blood) gracefully weaves the plot threads with his earthy writing about farm life on the Western plains. His skill in delineating three different, complex female protagonists is remarkable, and many of his precise, dialogue-driven scenes are little gems. Yet this is not frothy woman’s fiction, but an authoritatively controlled tale with mounting suspense and violence that builds like a thunderstorm in the Black Hills. Combining quirky charm and matter of fact detail, the novel is a heartwarming portrait of an unusual kind of contemporary family.”
Viking Press , 2003