I don't know about you, but I'm ready for changing leaves, sweaters, and pumpkin-flavored foods. This heat has got to stop. And I love Colorado, but oh what I wouldn't give for a Trader Joe's run, so that I could make these. When we drive back in a few weeks, I think I'm going to make cute husband stop in and buy the pizza dough before we even get home.
And I wanted to share with you this book:
(image taken from the author's website)
Please go find it--it's so wonderful. It's about two Iowa farm wives spanning from the early 1900s through the Great Depression, and the chapters alternate in their voices as their shared story is revealed. It absolutely brought to life for me the hardships of farming in the midwest during those desperate times, and the story itself is riveting.
I visited the author's blog where she wrote that it had taken her nearly fifteen years to get this novel published. She finished it when when she was twenty-three, and she's now thirty-eight. She described the excruciating and long revision process: "I cut five characters, two narrators, forty years in my timeline, and at least two hundred pages. I had about thirty pages left. I re-envisioned my plot, created another narrator, two more characters, and finally started in."
Sheesh.
In her acknowledgments, she thanks her literary agent, Esmond Harmsworth, who believed in her so long ago when her novel was but a dream. Well guess what? I interned for him at his agency in Boston, right after college. I sat in a back corner of the office and read the slush pile all day. Glamorous it was not.
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