She sets her story in Nevada’s Spring Valley, on a ranch that has been in the same family for generations. Such is the case with Jana Richman’s The Ordinary Truth. In the hands of these talented authors, the formula, though familiar, feels fresh. I can’t begin to list all the books that follow such a pattern, novels like Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Jane Smiley’s These Thousand Acres, Ladette Randolph’s Haven’s Wake (which I recently reviewed for “Bookin’ With Sunny”). Severe generational schisms are tearing the family apart because both the present and an unpredictable future are haunted by tragic events from a distant past. In fact, there seems to be more human connection with the land than with each other. The family ranch or farm, beset by change, barely holds a fragmenting family together. Repetitive plots and mythic threads run through many, many novels of the American West.
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