Miracle Country

April 1, 2020
A sensitive, thoughtful portrait of a part of California that few people see--or want to. The area around Bishop, California, was robbed of its water decades ago to fuel the growth of greater Los Angeles. That is the central fact of Atleework's celebration of a place swept by vast dust storms and economic dislocation, its neighboring mountains prone to burst into flames at a moment's notice. Another central fact is a family that is indisputably eccentric but perfectly suited to the place. "Every family cultivates a culture and lives by its own strangeness until the strangeness turns normal and the rest of the world looks a little off," she writes, and the aper�u is exactly right. Her mother labored for years under the death sentence of a little-understood cancer while her father sold maps he made and explored the surrounding country with the inquisitive intensity of a 19th-century surveyor. All deserts are places of absence, but the desert of the Eastern Sierra is more lacking than most. As Atleework writes, "In my first five years of life, less than twelve inches of precipitation fell." And yet, as one environmentalist remarks, the fact that LA takes away such little water as the place can deliver means that growth is something for other places to experience. The locals like it that way just fine, by Atleework's sometimes repetitive account. One who traveled to LA for medical treatment returned appalled by the smog and traffic, even more so by plans to desalinate ocean water to sustain still more growth. "Imagine this state with unlimited water," he told the author. "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should." It makes a fine motto for a region that Atleework clearly loves. A welcome update of classic works on California's arid backcountry by Mary Austin, Marc Reisner, and Reyner Banham.

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Starred review from May 1, 2020

Atleework's shimmering memoir is set in California's Eastern Sierra, where water is never far from the minds of those living there. Fires, drought, and high winds are regular occurrences causing devastating losses that Atleework and her family experience firsthand. However, it was the loss of her mother that complicated Atleework's relationship with the area and caused her to leave. Both memoir and memorial to place, this account has a haunting quality of sadness and loss, of well-watered land that could have been, and of family that might have been different. In her research of both the history of Owens Valley and Los Angeles, and the water rights that entangle them, Atleework traces the various indigenous peoples and settlers who called it home. However, more than a work of environmental change or history of place, this is a love letter of sorts to Atleework's mother. Her presence is felt in every page, and it is in the pursuit of peace amid her loss that ultimately brings Atleework home. VERDICT A bittersweet tribute to home and family in breathtaking prose that will appeal to lovers of memoirs and history, as well as anyone who enjoys beautifully crafted writing.--Stacy Shaw, Denver

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Starred review from May 25, 2020
Essayist Atleework recalls her family roots and explores the history of California’s arid Eastern Sierras in her ambitious, beautiful debut. Nearly two centuries of conflict over land, water, and individual rights flow through parallel stories involving the region’s first inhabitants, the Paiutes indigenous peoples, and ditch digger turned public works czar William Mulholland, who, beginning in the 1880s, drained the area’s rivers and lakes to provide water to distant Los Angeles. Atleework writes of her parents—jack-of-all-trades father Robert Atlee and educator mother Jan Work—who married and settled in Swall Meadows, population 200, in Owens Valley, a once-fertile area laid waste by Mulholland’s aqueduct system. Atleework’s childhood “on this obsidian edge of California” reads as mythic, with her bedroom opening onto towering Mount Tom and Wheeler Crest, and her loving parents as everyday gods who offered protection, especially during harsh winters: “We were never quite safe; we were never quite in danger.” She writes about her mother’s cancer death when she was 16, weaving in accounts of beauty from Mary Austin, a late-19th-century Owens Valley writer captivated by the desert, as well as of Paiute centenarian Hoavadunuki, who shares with her his story of white settlers’ desecration of the land in the 1920s. Atleework’s remarkable prose renders the ordinary wondrous and firmly puts this overlooked region of California onto the map.

July 1, 2020
Atleework pays tribute to the drought-ridden California desert of her childhood in this gimlet-eyed memoir. Atleework grew up in the Owens Valley, north of Los Angeles and east of the Sierra Mountains, in a house built into a hillside. Atleework mingles memories of growing up in this arid desert with the history of the land itself, including settlers who tried to tame or live in peace with the daunting terrain to the diversion of Owen Valley's water to more populous Los Angeles, which turned the once verdant valley into a land of drought. Atleework threads her family's struggles into her vivid descriptions of the land, such as how, when she was just 16, her mother, who had been battling an autoimmune disease for a decade, succumbed to cancer, fracturing their family. Atleework and her younger sister, Kaela, moved south to Los Angeles, while their brother, Anthony, floundered, pulling away from the family as he tried to find his place in the world. Nature lovers will immerse themselves in Atleework's vibrant prose and meditative musings.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)