An Owl on Every Post

When she was six, in 1913, Babb's father brought their family from their Oklahoma town to an isolated homestead in eastern Colorado, a sod house dug out of a dry land, with the nearest water two miles away. "This place is like a grave," he says when they arrive, and he's not far off. Their time there is often grim, with failed crops, desperate loneliness, and the meagerest of rare pleasures. But somehow, Babb, without shorting their misery, or romanticizing it either, makes of those years something quietly magical, through her attention to place and personality, to the wonders of this strange, inhospitable terrain and the people who manage to survive it. It's a beautiful book about coming of age on the very edge of existence.