Hard Scrabble

2019 Wrangler Award for Outstanding Juvenile Book Winner 2019 Spur Award - Western Writer's of America Finalist In 1910, after losing their farm in Iowa, the Martin family moves to Mingo, Colorado, to start anew. The US government offers 320 acres of land free to homesteaders. All they have to do is live on the land for five years and farm it. So twelve-year-old Belle Martin, along with her mother and six siblings, moves west to join her father. But while the land is free, farming is difficult and it's a hardscrabble life. Natural disasters such as storms and locusts threaten their success. And heartbreaking losses challenge their faith. Do the Martins have what it takes to not only survive but thrive in their new prairie life? Told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl, this new middle-grade novel from New York Times-bestselling author Sandra Dallas explores one family's homesteading efforts in 1900s Colorado.

“A kind of homemade book—imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It’s a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook.” —Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book Review “His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions.” —New Yorker “If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves’s Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiod’s] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris.” —Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World “Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the ‘given’ creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster.” —Southwest Review

This book represents the first time that the known history and a significant amount of new information has been compiled into a single written record about one of the most important eras in the south central coastal bayou parish of Terrebonne. The book makes clear the unique geographical, topographical, and sociological conditions that beckoned the first settlers who developed the large estates that became sugar plantations. This first of four planned volumes chronicles details about founders and their estates along Bayou Terrebonne from its headwaters in the northern civil parish to its most southerly reaches near the Gulf of Mexico. Those and other parish plantations along important waterways contributed significantly to the dominance of King Sugar in Louisiana. The rich soils and opportunities of the area became the overriding reason many well-heeled Anglo-Americans moved there to join Francophone locals in cultivating the crop. From that nineteenth century period up to the twentieth century's side effects of World Wars I and II, Hard Scrabble to Hallelujah, Volume I: Bayou Terrebonne describes important yet widely unrecognized geography and history. Today, cultural and physical legacies such as ex-slave-founded communities and place names endure from the time that the planter society was the driving economic force of this fascinating region.

The two-time National Book Award finalist and author of Goodbye to a River ruminates over what an “unmagnificent” Texas homestead has meant to him. “A kind of homemade book—imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It’s a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook.” —Edward Hoagland, The New York Times Book Review “His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions.” —The New Yorker “If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves’s Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiod’s] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris.” —Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World “Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the ‘given’ creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster.” —Southwest Review

A tale of deception and adversity, Hardscrabble tells how unscrupulous politicians, emigration agents, and philanthropists lured impoverished emigrants to farm the Muskoka backwoods in the 1870s. What these new settlers weren't told was that their land was situated on the rocky Canadian Shield.

When a local Philadelphia radio host known for his incendiary right-wing tirades is arrested for possession of illegal prescription drugs, the incident sets into motion a series of events that leads ultimately to the death of a homeless man. In the complicated mix is the local Benedictine monastery, a Nobel-prize-winning leftist academic, and a homeless advocacy group, among others. Now Gregor Demarkian, a retired F.B.I. agent, is hired by a local legal project to look into the circumstances surrounding the death of their former client--a task that leads Demarkian through a mirror-maze of motives and actors as he struggles to unravel a most complex puzzle before the killer strikes again.