Midwife Mildred Harrington is riding back home one evening after checking on one of her pregnant neighbors when she stumbles upon an injured stranger. She soon realizes it’s her old sweetheart, Pat, from country school—and he may not be telling the full truth about how he was injured. Set in rural Montana in 1925, Waltzing Montana follows Mildred as she grapples with feelings for Pat while also trying to overcome the horrific abuse she suffered as a young teenager. Ultimately Mildred must decide whether to continue her isolated life or accept the hand extended to her. Inspired by the life of midwife Edna McGuire (1885–1969), who operated a sheep ranch in central Montana, Blew has turned the classic Western on its head, focusing on rural women and the gender and diversity challenges they faced during the 1920s.
"Self-assured and self-revealing, Waltzing the Cat will gratify Pam Houston’s many admirers, and it will lure plenty of new readers into her wild rivers" —Portland Oregonian In this remarkable follow-up to the best-selling Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston traces the story of peripatetic photographer Lucy O’Rourke through eleven linked fictions “full of memorable paragraphs and…sentences worth underlining” (Rocky Mountain News). Lucy is prone to the wrong decisions at critical times—not to mention natural disasters—but a surprise encounter with Carlos Castenada sends her back to her beloved Rocky Mountains, where she takes comfort in animals, the jagged landscape of Colorado, and the sage advice of women friends. Houston serves up her characteristic blend of relationships and adventure in this story of one woman’s struggle for balance in a world that keeps pitching and rolling under her feet.
Set in central rural Montana in 1925, Waltzing Montana follows midwife Mildred Harrington as she grapples with feelings for her old sweetheart while also trying to overcome the horrific abuse that she suffered as a young teenager.
Bad form… When Corinne Blakely, a grande dame of international ballroom dancing, is poisoned, the dance community—including champion dancer Stacy Graysin—is left in an uproar. Corinne was penning a tell-all memoir, but now her secrets might well remain hidden, just as the killer perhaps intended. The victim’s dance card was full of people who might have wanted her silenced, if not dead. But when Maurice, a ballroom instructor at Stacy’s dance studio Graysin Motion, becomes the prime suspect, she has no choice but to waltz in and take the lead in another murder investigation. Clearing Maurice’s name by finding the real killer is going to be harder than a running spin turn. But there’s one thing Stacy knows for sure—she’s not about to let the murderer dance away scot-free.
2023 Western Heritage Award for the Western Novel At age seventeen Tam Bowen left her Montana home in disgrace after giving birth to a son out of wedlock. After working her way through college, she settled in Portland, Oregon, where she began making a living for herself and her son by writing soft-porn romance novels. Now, at fifty, Tam is estranged from her son and deeply depressed. She has returned to the cabin in Montana's Big Snowy Mountains where she grew up, to ponder the choices she has made in her life. At first dismayed by the many changes she finds in the mountain community, Tam gradually makes a few friends and becomes increasingly involved in the lives of two troubled teenagers, who draw her back into the horsemanship she turned away from so many years ago. For Tam, horses provide a sense of stability amid the uncertainty of her new-old life and expose the vulnerability of all the folks who struggle with the vagaries of a tough place.
Headwaters County District Attorney Jefferson Kirk reluctantly agrees to assist John Sharp and the Sharp Ranch launch a recreational cattle drive business. Swollen mountain streams and washed out roads first plague the fledgling enterprise's trip into Montana's Big Belt Mountains. The adventure and intrigue increase when the cattle drivers encounter a religious/military sect led by Caleb Howe. This cult like group has moved to the Lucky Dog Mining Claim intent on establishing a new nation in the wilds of Montana. Kirk and Sharp must again rely on their wits, outdoor acumen and Kirk's creative legal strategies to extricate themselves and the cattle drive guests from danger. Montana Justice is the third novel in J.T. Flynn's Montana series. Readers familiar with Montana Pursuit and Montana Mirage will find Headwaters County Sheriff Ben Green, rancher William J. Sharp and the attractive journalist Heidi Singer together again in a new adventure. JOHN "J.T." FLYNN was raised on a cattle ranch in southwestern Montana. He has been a prosecuting attorney for many years. He shares his love and understanding of Montana's Big Sky country not only in his books but also through his work as a hunting guide and as one of the hosts of the Montana High Country Cattle Drive. Every summer, the cattle drive offers guests the opportunity to join Montana ranchers on traditional Montana cattle drives. Readers can contact John at [email protected] or by writing him at Post Office Box 96, Townsend MT 59644.
From Mt. San Angelo is a book-length anthology of new writing. All of the fiction, poetry, and essays in this volume, edited by William Smart, director of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), are being published here for the first time.
Glen Larum's first novel, Waltz Against the Sky, explores the fates awaiting four young men who leave home behind for various reasons and venture out into the world. Evan Blaine, an out-of-work newspaper editor who has fumbled through this more than once before, finds himself seizing another chance; Dink Downs, who has lost his first regular job on a Florida road crew, gets swept along by his older brother, Del, an ex-con who has agreed to drive across country to deliver an automobile for a former cellmate; and teen-ager Tony Angione is hitch-hiking from New Jersey to California to see if he can find himself, employment, and a future with an uncle who may be more myth than the building contractor who can answer his prayers. The paths of these four - Blaine, the Downs brothers, and Angione - are all destined to converge in West Texas, where they bump up against the people whom strangers are most likely to encounter in a strange place, and regional law enforcement officials like Sheriff Leo Blunt and his deputies, who are used to administering justice in their own way. As Waltz begins, Sheriff Blunt's world is turned upside down by an uncommon crime, a breakout from an unlocked jail and events spiral out of control from that moment. A flashback layering technique featuring varying viewpoints carries the reader along as the characters reach their appointments with destiny. While many of the encounters with the ordinary population, particularly Blaine's and Angione's, seem to affirm a basic goodness in people, there is an underlying tension that plays out to an unexpected end. Told in a laconic western voice, the story uses distinctive narrative variation to weave different perspectives of past and present into plainsong about ordinary people dancing with fate, yet rarely recognizing their partner. The novel makes a powerful case that while randomness calls the tune in life, it is the moral ambiguity of people in power that provides the background sheet music. The only question is, will anyone waltz away?
