A few of my favorite reads…
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Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All tagged Montana books
After experiencing the tragedies of Boone Caudill and his companion and best friend, Jim Deakins, alongside the level-headed wisdom of Dick Summers in The Big Sky, I eagerly reached for Gutherie’s second novel, The Way West. The Big Sky had certainly impressed me, and I looked forward to reading The Way West, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, wondering how Gutherie would continue the story.
Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) is an unsettling read; one replete with ghosts, curses, nightmarish yellow jackets, and plenty of the uncanny. Yet, in addition to the horror—a genre Danforth clearly plays with on multiple levels in PBH—the reader meets the witty, modern narrator, with her references to social media posts and snide humor. Plain Bad Heroines explores the lives and loves of women, both contemporary and early twentieth-century, as they unapologetically make their own ways. Plain Bad Heroines, like Danforth’s first novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, is LGBTQ fiction.
So much about Ellen Webb’s coming of age in Mildred Walker’s Winter Wheat (1944) is bound to the land of central Montana. Few novels place a reader so solidly in a landscape like Walker’s Winter Wheat. This novel is both inspiring and heart-breaking, as Ellen becomes a woman amidst the backdrop of WWII.
Diane Smith’s Letters from Yellowstone (1999) is a delightful, compelling and educational story about a fictional botany expedition into the wilds of late-nineteenth-century Yellowstone National Park. Smith inserts historically accurate details about the early years of Yellowstone National Park including cavalrymen stationed at the park and a young Native American family living quietly in its back country.
