A Sandhills Ballad, by Ladette Randolph, $26.95. Randolph’s new novel begins when Mary Rasmussen, a strong-willed, independent young ranch woman living in western Nebraska, loses her husband and a leg in a freak accident. As she recuperates, she is often visited by Ward Hamilton, a conservative, patriarchal minister.
Determined to go on with her life, she is fitted with a prosthesis, takes classes at Mid-Plains Community College and accepts Ward Hamilton’s marriage proposal.
Her former life behind her, she and her husband start a family. Her life soon is taken up with trying to stretch every cent to care for the children and keep up the house. Because her husband is rarely home, Mary gets a job with the hospital and tries to settle into the community. A friend seeks her out, and, not caring about her husband’s opinion, she drives the woman to another city for an abortion.
Ever on the lookout for a mission, Ward finds it in Treegardin, a powerful company in the area intending to construct a new rendering plant. His sermons grow increasingly strident as he rails against the plan. He founds CCCA, Concerned Citizens for Clear Air, with the purpose of fighting Treegardin’s plants. A suit is filed. His obsession takes over their lives.
But, in spite of the risk Ward’s stance may have on the livelihood of the local ranchers, Mary keeps quiet. Not until an AP reporter comes to town to cover the preliminary hearing of the suit against the company does she become aware of the compromises she has made.
Built on believable circumstances and characters, “A Sandhills Ballad” is a tragic story about family and land and personal ambition.
Lake Overturn, by Vestal McIntyre, $24.99.) Vestal McIntyre centers his first novel in and around the small, seemingly idyllic town of Eula, Idaho, where all daily life appears to be an open secret.
The time is the mid-1980s. Dominated by the Mormon Church, the family is the major emphasis in the small town of Eula. This presents a difficult situation for Lina and Connie, two single mothers who live in the trailer park and sometimes entertain men.
Lina — a Catholic and the daughter of a migrant Mexican farm workers who works as a house cleaner and is involved with a married man — is particularly nervous about the return of her two very different boys. But she has her neighbor and friend, Connie, to lean on. Connie also is expecting the return of her son, the one who shares his love for science with one of Lina’s boys.
Determined to win the statewide science fair, Jesus and Gene construct what they call “lake overturn,” a real scientific phenomenon in which deadly gases collect and eventually erupt from a lake’s depths. And as they put together their experiments, they come in contact with Wanda, a local with a drug habit determined to become the birth mother for a couple who cannot conceive.
But it is Enrique, ever the loner and possibly homosexual, who makes a quiet statement against the church’s influence by refusing the high school’s free lunches offered by the Eula Assembly of God and spends the lunch hours shooting baskets. Enrique proves to be the novel’s most interesting character.
As outsiders, the boys and their mothers become the author’s most effective tools in this nicely handled exploration of the world’s effect on the tightly woven life of a small town driven by faith.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes regularly about new regional fiction releases.
