Hell's Bottom, Colorado

October 29, 2001
Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, Pritchett's debut is an admirable, steely-eyed collection of stories and vignettes featuring a family of ranchers in mountain-shadowed Colorado. Pritchett, raised a rancher herself, writes beautifully about the hard work and casual cruelty of ranch life. Forest fires, stillborn animals, poverty, cold and violence: all play as significant a role in the shaping of these characters as their emotionally hardscrabble family life. The three family groups that form the collection's core are brought uneasily together by an act of violence: the murder—by her own husband, Ray—of Rachel, youngest daughter of stubborn matriarch Renny. Some of the finest writing is in the stories about Rachel's children, Billy and Jess: "A Fine White Dust" chillingly illustrates their relationship with Rachel's abusive husband, and in "Dry Roots," one of the most painful and evocative stories, Billy and Jess come upon a horribly mutilated calf—the property of a vicious neighbor—and must make the decision to end its suffering. Pritchett's emotional revelations are often painted with broad strokes, as when Ben and Anita, estranged brother and sister, agree "that devastation looks pretty damn good from afar." But just as often, the writing is redeemed by fierce tenderness: "The wheat is starting to turn, flashes of deep gold streaking through tall, waving green....I suspect most city-folk... don't realize that wheat grows up green and living and then it dies, and that's when it becomes useful." Fans of Annie Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Stories
and Jon Billman's When We Were Wolves
should enjoy this visceral, accomplished collection.

February 1, 2002
Adult/High School-A collection of well-crafted stories told by the members of a ranching family. Renny and Ben, after raising their two daughters, now live at opposite ends of the ranch, but miss the closeness they once shared. Carolyn, the elder daughter, is happily married, but just has to go to town because she knows an old beau has stopped there. Her daughter confronts her grandfather's hired man with a mixture of bravado and caution; son Jack takes his girl to Denver for an abortion, knowing they're too young to be parents, but determined to keep the pregnancy a secret. Rachel, Renny and Ben's younger daughter, is a battered wife who is eventually murdered by her husband. Their children, Billy and Jess, are adolescents struggling to find the courage to confront their cruel father. The stories jump back and forth in time, but their message is clear: this family's ties are as quixotic, fierce, and enduring as the land that binds them together. Teens will find this a moving portrait of the American West and what it takes to eke out a living from land that is as harsh as it is beautiful.-Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA

Copyright 2001 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2001
With the rugged beauty of the Rocky Mountains as backdrop, Pritchett's spare yet richly evocative stories portray the stark reality of life on a Colorado cattle ranch, where three generations of one family tend the land and animals, devoting and losing themselves to an existence few would understand or choose to follow. Through love and loss, birth and death, marriage and separation, Hell's Bottom Ranch is a place of emotional extremes and complex dichotomies. Ultimately, it's also a place where simple beliefs create a world that can be as heavenly as it is harsh, as protective as it is predatory. Precisely drawn and fully developed, Pritchett's characters depict life in this diverse and dramatic environment through scenes that reveal both the beauty of the native landscape and the brutality of man's and beast's struggles to exist within it. Regardless of whether the songs she hears are sung by a meadowlark or a jailbird, Pritchett excels at juxtaposing the sensuous with the severe, the rapturous with the repugnant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)