ACCESS DIGITIZED EDITION
Guide/Reviews Database
OLDER FICTION
Leavitt, Martine

Buffalo Flats

240 pp. | Holiday/Ferguson | April, 2023 | Trade ISBN 9780823443420 $18.99 | Ebook ISBN 9780823443758 $9.99
(2) YA Based on family history, Leavitt's coming-of-age story is set in an 1890s Mormon settler community in Southern Alberta, Canada, at the eastern edges of the Rockies, and focuses on seventeen-year-old Rebecca. In an opening both startling and humorous, Leavitt begins: "Rebecca had heard her father and others call this land God's country often enough that she wasn't as surprised as she might have been to come upon him... He was dressed in his work clothes, but you knew God when you saw him." It's fitting that many of Rebecca's consequent ups-and-downs are driven by the desire to own the very piece of "God's country" that she finds so beautiful--an ­outlandish ambition for a woman. With her mother's support, she determines to earn the exorbitant $480 it will cost to buy the quarter section; in the meantime, her close-knit family and community offer rich, unpredictable ground for her efforts to learn and live with integrity--and without complaining. Ventures into midwifery and nursing with her mother; ­calamities of weather, domestic violence, and a devastating flu; ­competition for romance and talk of women's suffrage: all are fodder for Rebecca's articulate, funny ­self-examination and deepening growth. Always sensitive to the ­beauties of earth and sky, Rebecca longs for a return of the elk and buffalo, part of the author's tacit acknowledgment of local Indigenous peoples and the damage wrought by white ­expansion. Leavitt's writing is suffused with the beauty of the earth and sky.
Reviewer: Deirdre F. Baker | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2023

RELATED 

OLDER FICTION

What Beauty There Is
by Anderson, Cory
OLDER FICTION

Between Perfect and Real
by Stoeve, Ray
OLDER FICTION

Zoe Rosenthal Is Not Lawful Good
by Werlin, Nancy
OLDER FICTION

Home Is Not a Country
by Elhillo, Safia
OLDER FICTION

All Our Hidden Gifts
by O'Donoghue, Caroline
More

Get connected. Join our global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

We are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing.

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER?