First, let me state that all that keeps this book from being a 5 star is the sudden shift into evasiveness at the end. Until then, we are presented with a great stories about the pain (and pleasure) of growing up isolated on a ranch in Montana. Judy Blunt, living up to her name, writes with an eye to detail that brings to life the difficult times and draws you in - ... BR>Though a natural storyteller, the first few chapters show well-written paragraphs that don't quite hold together, but she quickly hits her stride as she relates her stories with a compellingly clear voice. With economy of words, she writes "Already most of what we knew went unsaid" and in that one sentance we get the silence, the isolation of the family and within the family, the yearning for dialogue she does not find. A growing subtext is her realization that tho she loves the land her family and later her husband work, she will never "own" an acre, never be fully herself there. Aside from the relentless work and isolation is the subservient position of most women on ranches (in fairness to ranchers, her mother seems to have had more power and respect than she later has as a wife). ... Blunt is not afraid to present her own faults to death, which is why the shift away from honesty to evasiveness at the end is all the more disappointing. I did not read this because I wanted to hear an account of her marriage breaking up, but after so much honesty and hundreds of pages of her growing unhappiness, the book skips from being unhappy to being divorced in Missoula. What made her finally leave? What did she think when she had the ranch in her rear view mirror? How did she come to the decision to take the kids and was that part of it - getting them out? Did she leave a man or the land? The memoir could easily suggest the land was at fault as much as the man. In a memoir named Breaking Clean, we need to see that break, not just her unhappiness - the title is like an unfullfilled promise. Perhaps it was respect for others' (her kids, her ex-husband's) privacy - or maybe she just chickened out. But she chose to write the memoir, not a novel. What we expect is a book about breaking away, not just the years that explain why she broke away.

Judy Blunt's memoir of life on Montana ranches is a far cry from Willa Cather's portrayals of frontier Nebraska, but there is something of the same spirit in both writers, each strong-willed, independent-minded, and talented in a world dominated by men. Each maintains a love of the open prairie, but while Alexandra Bergson in "O Pioneers!" is able to hold her own and thrive on the land, Blunt is hemmed in and frustrated at each turn, a ranchwife-in-training through girlhood and finally a ranchwife with children of her own. Physically strong and fearless as any man, she uses hard labor as a way to cope with a life-long belief in the fundamental unfairness of being denied opportunities simply because of her gender. In her thirties, she finally leaves the ranch and starts a new life in Missoula as a divorced mother, university student, and writer.

However, her book is not about the break-up of her marriage or her final decision to leave behind the life she'd been living. It is a carefully remembered recounting of her childhood, youth, and early years as a rancher's wife. It's an often turbulent story, where every passage from one stage of life to the next is marked by resistance, dismay, and a sense of deep loss. The people in the circle of her family are captured in fiercely observed detail -- especially her mother and father, her sister Gail, her husband John, and John's parents. The physical world they inhabit is vividly rendered -- the character of the arid, prairie land, the seasonal changes, the extremes of weather, the isolation, and the difficulty of making a living out here against the odds. She also captures the constraints of the social world they inhabit, and she articulates clearly the limited possibilities for personal growth and independence where gender roles and social norms are rigidly observed.

She provides a realistic portrayal of ranch work for men, women, and their children as long days (and nights during calving season) of routine physical labor, and she describes the neverending work of cooking, gardening, child-rearing, putting up food for the winter, trips to town for supplies, doing ranch chores, and pitching in when the men need an extra hand. Meanwhile, the chapters in her book center around the breaks in the routine -- the unexpected events that become the material for "stories," the makings of family lore, local legend, or gossip (as when her newly-wed husband John is observed welding together the broken frame of their old bed).

Among the breaks in the routine, there is an Indian boy who is a student for a short while in her all-white one-room school, the winter of 1964 which maroons her family during a severe blizzard that wipes out much of their cattle herd, a prairie fire fought by the whole community, an older boy in high school who attempts unsuccessfully to have sex with her, a harrowing 50-mile trip to the nearest hospital as her daughter is burning up with a high fever. Blunt also describes well the cultural clash that occurs when kids born and raised in the country find themselves navigating the town-oriented world of high school, with its very different adolescent mores and values.

Blunt is a fine writer and is able to wring suspense and pathos from her material. Starting as she does with the break-up of her marriage and then backtracking to tell her story from the beginning, she makes of the book a real page-turner. While the book might well appear on a list of feminist literature, such a label is too limiting. The story she has too tell is much broader; it is at home with books about rites of passage and coming of age, the West, rural living, ranching, and nature writing. As a companion to this book, I'd also recommend Linda Hasselstrom's "Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains" and Wallace Stegner's "Wolf Willow," which describes his boyhood on a homestead along the Montana-Saskatchewan border, 50 years earlier and about 100 miles northwest of Blunt's country.

This is one of those books that took me quite a long time (a week) to finish, and I finally realized it was because I didn't want it to end. Ms. Blunt writes about a childhood in the west in the style of Ivan Doig--one can feel the empty expansiveness of the land, the no-nonense people who live there, the sense of community, the difficult life. Her writing is beautiful--she relates sad incidences of life as well as some that made me laugh aloud. However, I agree with other reviews for this book: because Ms. Blunt was so honest and forthcoming in so many areas (some very personal) of her life, I found it frustrating when she didn't go ahead and write about the actual break with her husband. So many questions: what made her decide to go to the University of Montana? How did she actually accomplish the split? And how did her children react and adjust to the move?
I don't want this minor point to deter anyone from reading this great story. This is indeed a book to grab and close the door, curl up in a chair, and just enjoy the beauty of the words and images they conjure. The higest praise from me for an author is to finish a book and immediately search for another one he/she wrote. I will do that with Ms. Blunt.