Prairie Silence

October 1, 2012
A rural expatriate examines the pain caused by leaving the place she loved, the struggle involved in aligning her sexuality with faith and hometown values, and the devastation wrought by rural depopulation. Hoffert grew up in a tiny North Dakota farm town. From a young age the author understood she was gay. After attending college, she established a successful professional career and satisfying personal life in Minneapolis. Though the lure of home persisted, when she returned, she remained mute regarding her sexual preference. "There is something that silences the stories of lives," she writes, ."..and something that pushes those who cannot stand the silence away from the beauty that was once their childhood home." Hoffert returned home for a month during harvest season, intent on exploring the stark, beautiful landscape, working on the family farm and discovering the root of the ingrained silence surrounding her sexuality. Woven into the author's personal exploration are startling and sad facts on the state of rural life in America, illustrating the "painfully irreversible population decline" that is leading to the extinction of small towns across the country. Hoffert ponders the meaning of this loss and whether she is a member of "the first generation to realize that the world of rural America--both the good and bad of it--will never again be as it once was." 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.

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March 1, 2014

Hoffert's graceful story describes both her personal conflict and struggle and their reflections in the prairie communities she calls home. She writes of reconciling her sexuality with her conservative upbringing and accepting herself while mourning the loss of small towns and the farms that sustained and shaped her life.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2012
In this affecting memoir, Hoffert proves that while you can indeed go home again, it will, of course, never be quite the same. A true child of the prairie, she grew up on a farm in North Dakota, experiencing, as many of her generational peers, a love-hate relationship with the vast, stark terrain and the decaying small towns that characterize the contemporary plains states. Despite her affinity with her childhood home, her essential need to escape was made more acute by the fact that she recognized, at an early age, that she was gay. Still, the literal and metaphorical prairie silence eventually drew her home for a monthlong stay at harvest time, because eventually to resolve everything, to truly find peace, you must come to terms with the place your inner soul calls home. A heartfelt coming-out story as well as an eloquent elegy to a rural way of life that is rapidly vanishing from the American landscape.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)