For this Bison Books edition, James Welch, the acclaimed author of Winter in the Blood (1986) and other novels, introduces Mildred Walker's vivid h...
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Mar 23, 2009
Sheila
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It took a while for this book to "grab" me, but once it did I was hooked. I loved the metaphor throughout the story of winter wheat and its comparisons to love and life. As Ellen's mom said, "That don't mean nothing. We get mad, sure! Like ice an' snow an' thunder an' lightning storm, but they don't hurt the wheat down in the ground any." (The strong, good wheat can still grow through the toughest of times.)
Feb 20, 2009
Rachel
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Thank you for this great recommendation Tami. This is written in one of my favorite settings - the Dust Bowl of the 1930's. However, the plot focuses on a young woman's perception of the strange relationship between her parents. Very interesting.
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Oct 16, 2011
Nancy
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Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker is a book told through the eyes of Ellen, a young woman who grew up on a wheat ranch in Montana. In 1940 the family ranch provided a bumper crop that allowed her to start college in Minnesota, by far the furthest she had ever been from her parents and the ranch. Several months after arriving for her freshman year Gil, a fellow student who has noticed her in the library, introduces himself. Soon they feel they are in love and plan to marry some day.
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Sep 09, 2010
Debbie
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There are some days when magic and power-grabbing kings and even dances at Almack's aren't satisfactory. Some days I just want to read about the sky and the earth, about crops and weather, about people who live simply and feel deeply. On those days, Winter Wheat is the perfect read.
The book is about Ellen Webb, a young woman who lives in rural Montana in the early 1940s with her Russian mother and Vermontian father. Their family has a ranch where they grow wheat, both spring and winter More...
The book is about Ellen Webb, a young woman who lives in rural Montana in the early 1940s with her Russian mother and Vermontian father. Their family has a ranch where they grow wheat, both spring and winter More...
May 01, 2010
AnnaMay
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I loved this book from the opening paragraph. The story is good, but even if it weren't top-notch, the language and pictures it created in my mind were well worth the read.
I like this era (1940 in farm country.) People were hard-working, big changes in accepting differences were up-and-coming, it seems the world was at a point of a catalyst to change.
How did Walker create such real characters? I feel like the book wasn't fictional, even though it was. It's a good love More...
I like this era (1940 in farm country.) People were hard-working, big changes in accepting differences were up-and-coming, it seems the world was at a point of a catalyst to change.
How did Walker create such real characters? I feel like the book wasn't fictional, even though it was. It's a good love More...
Aug 01, 2011
Shirley
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!This was a wonderful story, and very well written. I'm going to look for more of her writing. The story is about a young girl growing up in Montana on a wheat ranch. As an only child of a father born in Connecticut and a Russian mother, she felt the tensions and differences in her parents. She believed they hated each other, as her mother had tricked her father into marrying her. Her mother had nursed her father during the war, but he still suffered from his shapnel wounds. As the story p
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Jan 13, 2010
Stephany
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This was a beautiful, enjoyable read that I could not put down. The description (a girl from a dry-wheat ranch in Montana goes to college, can't afford to attend the next year, becomes a teacher) didn't prepare me to like it as much as I did, but Mildred Walker's writing is a treat. It's one of those books in which you pause to reread certain sentences purely for how beautiful they are.
I thought the end became a little earnest and precious, and that it went on for a bit too long, b More...
I thought the end became a little earnest and precious, and that it went on for a bit too long, b More...
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Jul 31, 2011
Melissa
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I truly loved this book. It was almost overly descriptive at times but I couldn't give it four stars. I tried to focus on each description and I fell in love with the story. I could not put it down. The author's description of being in love was the most perfect I have ever seen in writing. She also has a way of saying things completely poetically about her love for the outdoors. I feel exactly as the main character does about my love for the beauty of the earth. I will be reflecting on he
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Dec 28, 2009
Jan
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I enjoyed this book and how it was written. It is about a young woman raised on a wheat farm in Montana. She goes off to college and falls in love with a city guy. He comes to Montana in the summer and the roughness of the life scares him off. Her father was in WWI and injured in Russia and her mother is the Russian womna that nursed him back to health, Her mother lied to her husband and told him she was pregnant so he would marry her and take her to America. This has been between them their who
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May 24, 2011
Buffy
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I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did by the end. it is your classic coming of age story where you grow up to realize that fairy tales don't exist and there is no happily ever after. Life is hard, marriage is hard, forgiveness is hard. But when you look a little closer at how things actually play out, you might realize that you prefer real life to the fairy tale and the things that take work are stronger, more meaningful, and more beautiful. It reminded me of that quote from Eve
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Aug 03, 2009
Shirley
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I thoroughly enjoyed this book about the hardships of life on a Montana wheat farm during the 1940s. It is a coming of age story told by the ninteen-year-old only daughter of a Russian immigrant married to an American soldier during WWI. During the year and a half she experiences her first year at college, her first love, having to leave college because of a poor harvest and a year teaching at a very small isolated one-room school house. She experiences a range of emotions. The writing like th
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Nov 30, 2009
Denise
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An interesting look at the life of a young girl in Montana and dry-land farming in the 1940's. I felt that the book was an ode to the land and lifestyle, and a coming of age story. There is a lot said about the beauty of the different seasons on the farm, and about the main character's (Ellen) struggle to decide if she wants to accept her parents (with all their perceived flaws) and her life there, or leave for love and a different life. In the end, she learns to see her parents as they reall
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Mar 05, 2010
Cindy
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I'd never heard of Mildred Walker until recently, when this book popped up on my Amazon recommendations (based on the fact that I liked "The Magic of Ordinary Days"). On a whim I checked it out. What a LOVELY book. The lyrical (but still very accessible) writing, the character development, the settings, the metaphors - so beautiful. My one wish was that there would have been a little more closure in one certain aspect at the end - but other than that, it was a truly lovely book and del
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Aug 08, 2010
Nancy
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Winter Wheat is about a young woman named Ellen Webb and her family on a dryland wheat farm in Montana. It is also about her relationship with her father and mother and how her perception of them changes during a year and a half of going to college and returning to the area to teach.
Her education has not been completed, but her education depends on the growing seasons and the crop harvest. It is also a touching story of her love interests both at the college and at home and how she chang More...
Her education has not been completed, but her education depends on the growing seasons and the crop harvest. It is also a touching story of her love interests both at the college and at home and how she chang More...
Jan 07, 2010
Morgan
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Be sure to read the review on this site, that says it well. I could enter the wheat-hearvest world of this young single woman who becomes a teacher in a snowbound one room school in rural Montana, as part of her finding herself.
A book that draws me into it's world is a wonderful book. My friend Antje loaned me this book when I was recuperating from illness, so I felt somewhat isolated as the heroine did. Wonderful evocation of
a girl growing up in rural Montana, told with warm More...
A book that draws me into it's world is a wonderful book. My friend Antje loaned me this book when I was recuperating from illness, so I felt somewhat isolated as the heroine did. Wonderful evocation of
a girl growing up in rural Montana, told with warm More...
Sep 25, 2011
Laurel
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This is quite possibly my favorite book of the entire year! It's a beautifully written coming of age story, and though it was published in 1944, it is timeless. If you ever grew up, experienced heart break, left home and came back seeing it with new--and sometimes critical--eyes, and come to terms with your parents inevitable imperfections, this book will speak to your heart.
Ellen Webb is my favorite kind of female heroine--strong, deep thinking, and independent. She leaves her be More...
Ellen Webb is my favorite kind of female heroine--strong, deep thinking, and independent. She leaves her be More...
Jul 24, 2009
Christina
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Apr 18, 2009
Rene
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Squeaky clean book dealing with the reason for being, beauty, hands, seasons, times when one feels trapped in his/her circumstances, disappointments in parents (and the resolution of those feelings),being free from anyone else (good/bad p. 164), and an interesting Walt Whitman poem (p. 141 "There was a child went forth every day"). Finally, the comparison of how love grows like winter wheat, susceptible to cold, wind, temperatures and the affects of strong and week roots. Ellen explo
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Jun 28, 2008
Renee
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Written over sixty years ago about ranchers living in remote parts of Montana, this old fashioned coming of age novel has a surprising currency. 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. 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.
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Mar 04, 2011
Melissa
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I took a break for a little while half way through this book because it wasn't very interesting, but I picked it up again later and I'm happy I finished it. At first I thought this was a slightly depressing book about farming wheat but now I realize it actually had a much deeper meaning and I get it. It's about love.
"Look at that wheat, Leslie. It's been there all winter and it's had cold and snow on it and it hasn't been hurt any. See how green it is? How it's coming in spite of e More...
"Look at that wheat, Leslie. It's been there all winter and it's had cold and snow on it and it hasn't been hurt any. See how green it is? How it's coming in spite of e More...
Apr 19, 2011
Andrea
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Highly recommended--great American and Western themes. Spare but solid telling of life on a Montana wheat farm and the young woman at the beginning of adulthood trying to understand the relationships around her as she embarks on her own. In the tradition of Willa Cather but a little less self conscious and penetrating. The land here is more a character than a setting. The story left me wanting to see what this young woman would have to say about life ten or twenty years later.
Jan 27, 2012
Rebekah
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I loved the tambre of this book. Walker's realism and her love for the land remind me a lot of Willa Cather, who I adore. I thought the metaphor of the winter wheat was lovely: I've discovered the same thing through my own experience. I couldn't say that I fell in love with the book's romantic "hero," which made me feel a little left out of the experience of Winter Wheat. And I thought the author spent too many pages on the beginning of the plot and not enough on the conclusion--
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Oct 13, 2011
Bob
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Mildred Walker's Winter Wheat turned up in GoodReads recommendations on two of my genre lists, so a checked out a hardly used 1944 edition from the library and gave it a try. I'm glad I did. This is an insightful and sensitive book about a year and a half in the life of a twenty-year-old girl who grew up on a Montana wheat ranch. Winter Wheat is a “love story,” but it's deeper than what I think of as a typical love story. It touches on love of nature, love of open spaces, and love of family and
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Nov 19, 2011
Jill
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A good book. Her writing gives you the feeling your there with her experiencing it almost from her eyes not from the outside looking in. The best books that feel like good friends! You hate to finish a book like this and truly it would've been great to have her finish it more completely it was good though! It made me even feel twinges of my own remembrances of relationships somewhat like that! Feelings I haven't felt in a long time!
Mar 23, 2011
Karlyne
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I thought after reading The Glass Castle last month that I wouldn't read another book that spoke so personally to me for a really long time. But this one was a serendipitous trip to not just childhood and the preconceptions we carry around about our parents, but adulthood as well. I am so thrilled (literally) that I picked this up off of the library sale shelf and spent $.32 for it! I can't wait to find the rest of her books.
Mar 01, 2009
Denise
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I enjoyed this book. The book takes place in the 1940's and is about a young woman, from rural, central Montana. It takes the reader through a year and a half of her life as she experiences the pain and awakening of growing up. From leaving her family wheat farm to go to college, to having to sit out a year because of bad crops, we share with her the insights she gains into her parents and herself.
Jul 14, 2010
Tara
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I am becoming notorious (at least to my husband who hears my complaints) for prematurely judging a book, complaining about it in the beginning, after a rough start becoming so absorbed in it, and then finally falling in love with the story. This was one such book. It just started slow to me. Walker writes about a young woman raising wheat in Montana with her parents. She learns of work, sacrifice, love, relationships, loneliness, pain. Walker uses winter wheat as a metaphor and it is woven throu
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Feb 13, 2011
Julie
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This is the March 2011 bookclub book and I am really sorry that I will nt be here for the discussion. The language in this book is beautiful. The story is purportedly about a young woman but I found the most interesting part to be the development of her understanding of the lives of her parents. There are several passages I would like to remember as quotes. I really liked this one.
Aug 30, 2009
Leah
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I just discovered Mildred Walker and I am crazy about her. The way she writes about the Earth and people's connection to it is amazing, as are her metaphors, similes, and imagery. Her characters are quite unique and engaging as well, though some are afflicted with the chronic dissatisfaction so common in contemporary literature. She's very reminiscent of Willa Cather.
Apr 30, 2010
Kiersten
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I loved reading this book. Walker's writing was delicious. The beginning, where Ellen is a student, and was remembering her childhood was some of the most poetic writing I've experienced in a while. It was clear the author had life experience in Montana on a farm. The character development, especially of Ben and Anna, was fantastic. The one thing that bothered me in the end was the metaphor of love compared to winter wheat; not that she drew the metaphor, but that I got the feeling if the crop o
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