Her experiences and emotions as she becomes more independent are articulated so well, I couldn't help but reflect on my own at that same phase. The metaphor of winter wheat is gently woven throughout the story and provides an excellent backdrop for the main character's struggle and growth. Walker's descriptions of the work and worry of farm life are at once vivid and simple. Many of my friends during high school worked and lived on farms and we spent many afternoons driving back country roads with nothing but corn fields and blue skies in sight. It's beautifully written and I have never read anything that reminded me so much of the time when I was 18-19 years old. As soon as I read the last lines I wanted to start all over again. This is a book that is meant to be owned, loved, read and re-read. Thanks to the University of Nebraska Press for keeping this fine novel in print. Its lessons about hard work and survival, the bonds of love, living with insecurity, and the lifelong effects of choices made affirm a view of life that embraces both loss and reward. I recommend this novel highly for its way of creating very individual characters leading quite plausible lives rooted firmly in very real physical and psychological worlds. Also remarkable is the novel's wartime setting, as Walker writes of Pearl Harbor and the impact of entry into WWII on the lives of her characters, even while that war was still being fought (the novel was published in 1944). Though Montana was her adopted home (Walker grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and attended Wells College), she writes with an intimate knowledge of farm work that is rare in literature. Most remarkable for a reader growing up in a mid-century rural community, the novel evokes vividly the seasonal rounds of living and working on a farm circa 1940.

Meanwhile, it can be read with a kind of page-turning breathlessness that keeps readers hoping that everything - against all odds - will somehow turn out for the best.

Its bittersweet portrayal of human relationships has a deep ring of emotional truth, and its understanding of the constantly shifting nature of identity makes it almost postmodern. Written over sixty years ago about ranchers living in remote parts of Montana, this old fashioned coming of age novel has a surprising currency.

Winter wheat by mildred walker