Judy Blunt's memoir Breaking Clean, about her thirty years spent on wheat and cattle ranches in Eastern Montana will rid the reader of any idealized notion of living an easy life out in nature and attending the iconic one-room school house as one's place of education. Ms. Blunt talks of her childhood, her own marriage, her relationship with the land and the farm animals, and her coming into an understanding of her own self. as a self-assured woman in a very patriarchal landscape. In lyrical yet no-nonsense prose, we are brought into Blunt's world through various stories of her life out on her ranch. She conveys the expansiveness yet isolation of living nearly 50 miles from any significant town. This book captures the gritty, hardscrabble life in its most stark realities. While i wasn't necessarily captivated or wrapped up in the memoir, I learned a great deal about what it was like to be a woman living a ranch life so far from creature comforts.
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