This is the fictional account of the life of the author's grandmother. For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith lived in a dirt dugout out West with her family. During this time there was from a flash flood; the kids were cut off from their parents. Quickly Lily made the others climb a cottonwood tree. When they were physically exhausted from hanging on to the tree, she kept them awake by quizzing them until the water at last went down. (This is an example of what kind of person Lily was.) At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town—riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. Later she wed a rancher. She helped him run a vast ranch in Arizona. They sold bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby's crib. Lily stopped making an effort to cook because she did all the work, and it was eaten so quickly. She didn’t do laundry until it was absolutely necessary. After the pants got filthy, they put them on backwards, then inside out. They wore them until they were completely shiny with grime. Ranching was dirty, hard work. Lily never got far from hardscrabble drudgery. There were tornadoes, droughts, and the Great Depression. Lily, however, was a strong, feisty, opinionated woman, a real character. The book is a tribute to the author’s love for her Grandmother. While it’s a work of fiction, it doesn’t have certain fictional aspects to it: emotion, nuances of character & plot, etc. That is a drawback. It does evoke a time and place though and an unforgettable woman.
***three stars doesn't mean it wasn't a good read.