"Be of good courage..." [from Psalm 31:24]

 

[front elevation and entrance, the Duomo--Florence, Italy]

 

[no title]

 

Book Review: "Mailboxes and Old Barns"

     

   I love history. I love personal narratives. I love dry humor. And I really love learning about new things, or finding out the reasons behind things I did know, but didn't understand.

   All these things are in Mailboxes and Old Barns.

   The author, Sharon Larsen Torgerson--a dear online friend--presents vivid moments and experiences from her life, growing up in the 1950s on a farm in Dane Valley, a prairie community in northeastern Montana, populated by the sons and daughters of the Danes who homesteaded there a generation earlier, including her paternal grandparents in 1908. Her maternal grandparents established their homestead in 1910, about 45 miles further north, very near the Canadian border, in an almost identical community of Danish farmers. Evidence of her Danish family heritage is deep, rich, and pervasive throughout the book.

   The author weaves her narrative upon strong support threads, drawn from the lives and experiences of her extended family--parents, grandparents, older siblings and other relatives--all of which anchor her story in the reality of a life completely different than mine.  That "differentness" made this book as fascinating to me as any fairy tale or adventure story. And the humor pulled me along, chapter after chapter.

   Sharon is the young girl in the book, living and acting in that long ago time, but is also standing a little apart and writing about that young girl. It's somewhere between a completely "I" story and a completely "she" story, but both viewpoints together, simultaneously--like being in that particular time but also viewing it from a distance. It's a good tension. 

   The chapters roll on, like varicolored beads on a string. "There's this...and then this...also this..." Each chapter is a stand-alone, but each one shines light after light upon a whole life. The addition of several letters from her father to his young bride-to-be, written in the mid-1920s, adds to the generational nature, as do memories of grandparents and select writings from her oldest brother.

   Reading Mailboxes and Old Barns was for me, like opening a door into an unfamiliar, four-dimensional universe--four dimensions because it focuses on time itself: changing time, unknown time, distinctive time, inexorable time. 

   It makes for good and satisfying reading. I think you will be engaged by it as I was, fascinated and entertained by it as I was, educated by it as I was.

   All that is so very worthwhile.

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[If you are interested in finding out more, or purchasing this book, just click on the Mailboxes and Old Barns book image on the right sidebar.] 

"Yes, I have a good heritage..." [from Psalm 16:6]