I enjoy memoirs like these---I really should look for some more. I liked reading about all of the food and recipe descriptions, especially. I thought her mother was a genius in the way she used her chickens to breed turkeys---fantastic! I was also amazed at the way the doctors experimented with extreme dehydration to try to repair a detached retina. Can you imagine how dehydrated you'd have to be to make your eyes dry up enough to pop your retina back into place? Sad. The subtitle "My Pioneer Mother" is a bit misleading as there are really only a few lines about her mother as a single person and the book is just as much about everyone else as it is about her. At any rate, it was a good read---I'm glad I took the time.

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Another book read on the train--this time in eastern Montana, and western North Dakota--I was just 30 miles south of the homestead. Again, the backdrop added to the book--looking up and seeing rows of poplars (many most likely planted by homesteaders years ago)readying themselves against the coming winter really brought home the bleakness of the land and homesteading life.

This book is really a collection of connected essays about the author's mother--much about food (always fun) and one I especially liked ('The Best of Both Worlds') about growing up around two languages. ( )

I was given this book by a fellow librarian who said it was amazing. She was right. I couldn't put it down. Simply eloquent prose about a woman and her family living on the North Dakota plains. Sweet descriptions of childhood memories centering around education, food, and the strength and fortitude of those who came before us. I didn't purposefully read this during Women's History Month, but I am happy I did. In doing so I feel like I paid respect to the women who did it all first ( )

The subtitle is “My Pioneer Mother,” and much of this memoir features Young’s mother Carrine Gafkjen Berg. But this is really the story of a family’s experiences in the early 20th century in North Dakota.

At age twenty-five, already considered a spinster, Carrine left Minneapolis to claim her own homestead on the western North Dakota prairie. Through her own hard work and perseverance, she managed to amass a key parcel of fertile land, living alone first in her claim shack and then in a modest farm house. A decade later she met and married Sever Berg, and they had six children.

Rather than a strictly chronological order, the book is divided into chapters by subject. Some of the chapters cover years of the family’s life (The Education of a Family and The Seedling Years, for example), while others focus on specific events (The Last Turkey or A Fourth of July in North Dakota). All are full of wonderful, loving descriptions of life on a settler’s farm, some funny, some touchingly poignant.

I particularly loved the first story about Young’s mother’s insistence on education for her children. She had to leave school after only three years to work on her own parents’ farm, and then was sent to Minneapolis to work at a boarding house, cooking and cleaning. She and her husband went to extraordinary lengths to ensure their children got the educations that they were unable to achieve. Despite the great depression, they managed to send all six of their children to college. ( )

This is a wonderful book and collection of memories of the author's mother and childhood homesteading on the North Dakota prairie. Carrine Gafkjen set off to homestead by herself in 1904, living in a claim shack, and turning the soil alone until she eventually turns a profit. She married at 34 and proceeded to have 6 children, of which the author is the youngest. These stories are heartwarming, backbreaking, and fascinating, and though most of the events took place less than 100 years ago, it is just astonishing how much life has changed in so short a time. I think of how my school limped along when we lost internet for two days, and compare the experience of three of the sisters in this book (one a teacher and the others students) who LIVED in their one-room schoolhouse because it was too difficult to get to school and back during the raging blizzards. This is a lovely tribute to the Norwegian families who settled our northern prairies.