by Annie Proulx
First published 2008
Dakotah Hicks travels the back roads of Wyoming, passing ranch after ranch in the hammered red landscape. Each property holds the same bitter truth: they have all lost a boy. These young men fell victim to the West's endless dangers. Liquor and speed claimed some. Rodeo accidents took others. Bad horses threw riders to their deaths. Boys drowned in irrigation ditches or fell from high trestles. Tractors rolled over on their operators. Guns that should have been empty fired their final shots. Dakotah knows this roll call of grief intimately because her own boy joined their ranks. The American frontier West continues its ancient pattern of taking the young, the confident, the healthy. Families endure these losses across generations, watching sons disappear from life's current just as they seemed most sure of themselves and their place in this unforgiving land.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, american, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: grief, small-town
Setting: Wyoming
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
221 pages · Hardcover · Scribner
Content warnings: death