Oh, it was a slow reading month. I finished a Danielle Steel book which I am not going to review. Sometimes you just need an easy really non thinking read and this was it for me. It wasn't half bad.
I also read a memoir called "This Life in In Your Hands" by Melissa Coleman. Melissa or Lissa as she is called in the book is the daughter of one of the forefathers of the organic gardening/homesteading movement. Here is the description from Amazon:
With urban farming and backyard chicken flocks becoming increasingly popular, Coleman has written this timely and honest portrait of her own childhood experience in Maine with her two homesteading parents during the turbulent 1970s. Inspired by the back-to-the-land lifestyle of Scott and Helen Nearing, Coleman's parents, Sue and Eliot, decided to create their own idyllic reality on 60 acres of land in Maine that was sold to them by the Nearing family for a token sum. While Coleman emphasizes the beauty of growing up in a family culture that valued the bounty of nature and freedom of expression, she does not hesitate to also expose farming's detrimental effect on family life—her own well-being as well as the accidental death of her younger sister
In some ways this was a little bit of a depressing read . In her author notes, she says she writes about this time period in her life as her therapy. She writes in the author notes," The losses my family experienced didn't happen because of our alternative lifestyle; these sorts of things can happen to anyone, anywhere. The reason they hit us so hard is that we didn't have a faith in something bigger than homesteading to guide us through life's difficult turns." I found myself being quite critical of Melissa's parents. It certainly doesn't glamorize the homesteading lifestyle as far as family life.
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