Claiming Ground

Laura Bell went out west in 1977, leaving her family in Kentucky and gaining a life of hard work and solitude among the sheepherders in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming. It's a hard existence, and Bell's fittingly stark and amazingly appealing memoir of her transformation from an Easterner to a Westerner is ably narrated by Laurie Birmingham. Her reading is unhurried and her voice quite nuanced--not soft but not harsh or sharp. It's the voice of one who recalls more than three decades of life--of gains and losses, laughter and heartache--a life that is shaped by the vast landscape of which these incidents are but a part. M.T.F. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine