Customer Reviews

Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills

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Part memoir, part travelogue, Norton's book centers around her family's cabin on a small lake on the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills. The story is told in three parts: her childhood at the lake in the 1950s and 60s, a sojourn there in 1984 where she sets out to write a thesis and settles instead into a job at a small-town bar and becomes romantically involved with a man she meets there, and a return visit several years later as she crisscrosses the Sandhills gathering material for a book.

Read uncritically, the book is a rhapsody of appreciation for the beauty of the Sandhills and a story of recovery, from a violent sexual assault far from home and a subsequent period of hard drinking and restless wandering. It speaks of the healing powers of nature and of the search for a lost self through memories of childhood innocence.

Read more critically, the book often doesn't quite follow through with some of the themes it puts forward. I wanted to know more about her relationship with her mother after her parents' divorce, an event that shattered Norris' world. While her accounts of the men she came to know there as an adult (most of them cowboys who are predatory in their attraction to her) are vivid and unsettling, I would like to have learned more about how she came to feel safe with a man again and to love.

Her roaming around Nebraska in the last part of the book tends to be a catalogue of places seen without getting much beneath the surface of them. There's a little history, some talk of the impact of corn and cattle on the environment, and many references to the depletion of the great underground reservoir, the Ogallala Aquifer. But balanced against these larger issues, a reader may want for accounts of experiences that pierce through the abstractions to the living human drama they embrace.

I recommend this book for readers who like stories of personal journeys and recovery, especially as lived in remote and isolated places. Also recommended: Teresa Jordan's "Riding the White Horse Home," Mary Clearman Blew's "All But the Waltz," and Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean."

This book was so much more than I had anticipated. I initially bought the book because it's about an area of the country that I know well. I found it to be a moving narrative about recovery and growth. It's about coming back from the edge. The author does a masterful job of explaining the healing power of home. I look forward to what she writes of next. This is a book by a woman that will be very readable by women, but not limited to women. Highly recommended.

Lisa Dale Norton writes about place. She writes about how place affects her, how place slowly and patiently healed her, about the wind, the water, the plants, the birds and the people of a certain place--the Nebraska Sandhills, filling the entire northcental part of Nebraska. And she writes even more specifically about Ericson, Nebraska, and her family summer home, the Big Six Country Club on Lake Ericson.

She writes lyrically about how much she loves the Sandhills, about the nature of the Sandhills and how she knows that she is only a secondary character is this vast hilly, sandy, treeless and marshy prairie. Interspersed between the stages of who she was and is are lovely vignettes from her notebooks about the unchanged, here, and the changing, there. By the end of the book, she wonders how long the water table will support the people she loves and the landscape she is passionate about.

But she also writes her own story, that of feeling abandoned by her mother as a young teen, about being attacked, raped and left for dead in her twenties and about her healing and regaining trust. "The things we do in our twenties and thirties are pilgrimages to find lost pieces of our youth." After years away from The Big Six Country Club, she returns to write her master's thesis on Ericson and The Hungry Horse Saloon. Although she writes in her journals and photographs life, she drifts through that summer and fall not knowing that she must wait and just be in that place for the healing to commence. Norton writes of equating growth with movement and finally realizing that inner landscape must be cultivated with stillness.

Norton's Notebooks are filled with prose poetry (the in-between vignettes). In "Dragonflies," she writes "Their gossamer wings moved like wind through riverside grass. Sometimes in flight, a dragonfly would coast, riding a current but only for a moment. I dreamed those magical creatures were relics from another age and I was some clever character, kneeling at water's edge gathering flowers."

In her narrative, she writes, "What succor is it, then, that rises from remembering, from the stories I tell? Slowly I come to believe that the mere telling itself is food for my soul. Story nurtures. I tell a story and I feel more whole."--as it is with us all.

Yet this is not a sweet and sentimental book. Norton writes with an edge of expectation, moving us forward to see the beginning of healing. She writes of the history of the land and the people as well as her family, long time Nebraska citizens. She writes, "What purpose do these stories serve, which rise from my childhood and haunt me as I travel these hills? I can not give up the belief that these memories, burning like lamps in the night shine through to me for a reason. Could it be a simple as the power of those things we love rising to remind us that we must name them? If I do not name those things I love, who will know what is worth saving and what can be let go?"

This is a good book. It tells of a life, a place and a heart that is healed.

by Judith Helburn
for StorycircleBookReviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Anyone who grew up in Nebraska, either in the Sandhills or anywhere along the Platte River would identify with this book. She is a wonderful descriptive writer and takes you to the place she wants you to see. It also brings to mind long ago memories of times you may have experienced by the similarities associated with her writings. A friend gave me this book and as they say, "The best friend is one who gives you a new book as a gift". She was, of course, right. I loved it.

It's not quite clear what the subject of Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills is. Is Norton's subject the Sandhills of Nebraska, the land Norton experienced during the three seasons that are the subject of this book, the seasons of a child, a wounded adult and finally a successful journalism instructor? Or is her subject her recovery from being abandoned by her mother and later brutally raped by a stranger? If her subject is the Sandhills what purpose is served by her digressions into the trauma she experienced? And if her subject is her own recovery, why isn't that recovery developed? We never know why her mother left or how Norton and her mother repaired their relationship although we see the two women together after their separation. We never know how Norton regained her ability to relate healthily with men. She tells us about a relationship to which she is unable to commit but we never know why. Norton writes about herself from a distance, as if she is still afraid to allow herself or others to get close.

Norton does tell us that the land helped her heal. The reader cannot doubt the importance the land holds for her for it is in writing about the land itself that Norton shines. Her vivid, careful observations are stark but filled with life as is the land itself. But how the land helped her heal is left woefully vague.

And the story of the land is also incomplete. In Part 3, the final part of the book, she begins to explore the adverse impact cattle ranching and the excessive growing of corn are having on the land. But these are themes that are new to the book and not supported by what has come before. She gives only a passing mention to the ranchers taking the land from the native Americans and never notices that the lake where she spent the free idyllic days of her childhood is itself a man made lake, a lake created by construction of a dam.

This is a memoir about healing and growth, about souls and landscape, and about the pain and beauty of love. Lisa Dale Norton combs through her childhood to make sense of her past, taking the reader through interior and exterior tapestries that become a beautifully written version of Self.

She faces her mirror with honesty and has meticulously researched the ecology of the landscape, which she distills to poetry. The two are combined and offered to be accepted, or not. The book has the viewpoint of a naturalist, and is food for empathy.

Having taken several of Lisa Dale Norton's writing classes (she is a superb teacher by the way, who helps you dig below the surface of your own memories to be a better writer), I was eager to see if she put into practice what she teaches. She does. "Hawk Flies Above" is a journey not only for the author but the reader. The power of her prose creates images not soon forgotten. Nebraska was never one of those places high on my list to visit, but Norton brings it to life and imbues it with rare beauty. "Hawk Flies Above" is a feast of words. And while there are places I would like to have more detail, that can be said of most things I read. This is a beautiful story of healing and courage.

In this lovely, lyrical memoir, we journey with Norton as she "lies close in to the land, skin to sand, bone to wind." By climbing with her through wounded landscapes--the Sandhills and her own heart--we also find a place of safety, become whole. That's what memoir is about... to find courage, heal ourselves in fellow travelers' stories.

I thought this book was terrific. It is so full of useful information presented in a way that applies not only to writers, but to almost anyone. I'm waiting eagerly for her next book.

Norton's assertions about her own history, soul, and mental states might as well have been taken out of a feminist literary criticism textbook - they are absolutely predictable and femisitically-correct, and thus come off as rehearsed conformities rather than genuine discoveries of self. This affection to stereotype marks every single page of the book, every chapter - Norton doesn't care to see beyond Stetson hats, cowboys and bars, really. The Notebook chapters are a series of well-crafted nature observation, but they only intersperse the main narrative, and the short relief they provide is not enough to dispell the numbing effect of the general tone of the book.