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Prairie Silence

A Memoir

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Prairie Silence

By: Melanie M. Hoffert
Narrated by: Abby Craden
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About this listen

A rural expatriate’s struggle to reconcile family, home, love, and faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people.

Melanie Hoffert longs for her rural North Dakota home with its grain trucks and empty main streets. But like many, she followed the out-migration pattern to a more urban life. When she returns home during harvest to confront the silences that have kept her at arm’s length from her childhood community, she finds it’s not easy. When asked if she's found a “fella,” rather than explain that she dates women, she stops breathing and changes the subject.

In this evocative memoir, Hoffert offers a deeply personal and poignant meditation on land and community, taking listeners on a journey of self-acceptance and reconciliation.

©2013 Melanie M. Hoffert (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Biographies & Memoirs Lesbian Studies Sociology Village
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Critic reviews

“The author’s mostly quiet narrative includes a wealth of haunting images and ideas that will linger long after the last sentence. A heartfelt love song to a place and its people as well as an honest and rewarding rendering of the author’s interior landscape.” ( Kirkus Reviews)
“The quiet, lyric prose of Melanie Hoffert’s Prairie Silence crept into my days, making it impossible for me to stop turning pages. This book is about looking for oneself in places we are so often afraid to venture. A beautiful debut from a brave new writer.” (Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance)
"Melanie Hoffert has written a gutsy, complicated book about the little town we both came from (but which she experienced in a much, much different way).” (Chuck Klosterman, author of Downtown Owl and The Visible Man)

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Interesting view, but a wrong fact at least once

If you are after a romance novel this isn't for you. Overall I enjoyed the book, there were a couple of little issues I had with it though.

One was the mention of Jane Goodall studying Gorillas. Sorry, that was Dian Fossey - Jane Goodall is Chimpanzees. Might seem like a minor fault, but it is a big difference in the zoological world. Not hard to have checked that fact.

It had me wondering what other facts might also be wrong with the story, and that is a shame.

I also found the constant ruminating about the Christian angle might have been a bit too much. The story could have told the same tale, but without so much theological debate. At times it didn't seem like a story about growing up gay in a rural community, but as a teenager working out their Christian faith. I can see that putting a lot of people off the book.

However, if you don't mind a look at how life in a small community can affect your life as you grow up, this is a decent book to listen to or read.

Narrator did a pretty good job. in fact, of the books I've heard her do I think this was her best effort.

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