REMEMBERED EARTH tells the story of a young woman, orphaned as a girl and raised by her widowed aunt in a small town on the Great Plains. Anna Garland works as a Kansas farm hand. She has a scholarship to Yale that her aunt sees as the girl’s gateway to a shining future. Anna loves Jonny Carter, but she reveals this to no one. She loves her work on the farm and the open sky above her. Evenings, she works in her aunt’s garage, restoring a 1954 Chevy pickup with help from her dilapidated welder friend Grady.
There is a remembered earth inside each of us–a great untraveled country–with dry rivers and thirsty soil, flint hills, and windmills drawing deep. This book seeks to map that vast terrain. It is a story about a young woman trying to manifest her own authentic life. And yet it is larger than this. It is about farmers and the land and the fate of America. It is about savoring the fragile sweetness of life in the face of what death takes. It is about the irresistible authority of love in determining the arc of human lives.
REMEMBERED EARTH is also a modern-day retelling of the Wizard of Oz, with the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion replaced by Jon, Harlan, Sam, and Grady. Keep an eye on these men, for the book is as much about them as it is about the girl.
“The night presssed up against the walls of the house, and the light from the kitchen spilled out. There was a moth smashing itself against the screen door, trying with single-minded desperation to reach the bright glow. It went tup-tup-tup, and each time it left a little bit of itself behind on the wire mesh.”
from Remembered Earth by Kirsten Stockman