Customer Reviews

In Open Spaces

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book took me about 2 weeks to finish. Not because it's slow, or boring...just the opposite. This was a beautiful look at a ranching family in Montana, and the struggles they go through with the land and each other. I didn't want to rush this book in any way. I wanted to savor every chapter, which is just what I did. The detailed discriptions of the land, and how their life is run made me feel like I was right there.

Blake Arbuckle tells the story of his family that begins in 1916 when he's 13 yrs. old, and goes on to 1946. By the end of this book I felt like they were all part of my own family. I highly recommend this book. Even though it's not fast paced, or a riveting tale that you finish in one day, it's a fascinating look at what life was like on a ranch, and the trials this one family endures. I would love to see a sequel to this book to find out what happens to the next generation of Arbuckles.

This breathtakingly good debut positively floored me. It is at once majestic and intimate. The author presents a family of strong, unique characters who must act as one to survive the unforgiving open spaces of Eastern Montana -- even as the family members increasingly form and break alliances with one another. Rich in detail, the author's ranchhand roots clearly run deep. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interst in "guy stuff" (ranching, baseball, murder?), "girl stuff" (unrequited love, intrafamily dynamics, handsome cowboys) or just stuff (life during the depression, hitching rides in mail trucks, how to hold a cigarette).

A friend turned me on to this one. What a stunner! A pitch perfect description of the tribulations facing a family attempting to survive each other and the rough, rough world of Montana ranch country in the first half of this century. The challenges facing the Arbuckle clan are overwhelming and bleak, and yet this book is absolutely charged with energy, life, and passion. I could not get the main characters (esp. Blake, Jack or Rita (ooooh, i LOVED rita), out of my head. And if for no other reason, read this book to experience what I will only describe here as an intense medical procedure performed on an injured (and profoundly angry) cow by lay people with no anestheia, one of the most gripping (and if you can believe it, sexually charged) scenes I have ever read. Like the "Corrections", Rowland captures both the intimate details of family life AND the overall impact of large societal forces (in this case, WW1, the great depression and relentless dust bowl, and WW2). This book is not getting the attention it deserves, it is one of the finest books i have ever read, grand in scope and true in its details.

This is an old-fashioned saga about a family on a ranch in the southeast corner of Montana. The story is told by one of four brothers, starting in 1916 when he is a 14-year-old boy and ending in 1946. Told in the first person, it maintains a 1940s sensibility. For even though it tells the story of the narrator's decades-long attraction to his brother's wife, there is still a chasteness about their relationship that would be implausible in a story told 50 years later. Suppressing his own sexuality, the narrator remains inexperienced well into his 30s, and there is a glancingly graceful moment in his story, as a widow he is courting discovers this on their first night together.

Moving slowly through 30 years of western history, the novel captures the hard-scrabble life of a family on the plains, with accounts of prairie fire, the withering drought of the Depression years, and finally the beginnings of economic recovery as war rages in Europe and the Pacific. Children are born, young adults grow old. There are marriages, illnesses, accidents, and deaths to be mourned. Personalities clash, and conflicts linger without resolution. One brother drowns, another disappears for periods at a time, one brother turns down a chance to play professional baseball, another marries unwisely. And as the years come and go, the family remains on the ranch, finding strength in the land when they do not find it in each other.

Rowland often rises well to the material. The narrator's trip to Omaha, where he secretly meets up with a baseball scout is well told, especially as it includes an encounter with the Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige. An especially vivid scene involves the efforts of two people (the narrator and his sister-in-law) tending to a cow whose womb has prolapsed after giving birth. Their struggle to save the cow, lasting hours, is told in breathtaking detail and grows to an emotional pitch that comes to represent the difficult intensity of their own relationship.

I recommend this novel for those interested in the rural West, ranch life, the Depression, and the intricacies of extended families. It's a good solid read.

We enter the scene with young Blake Arbuckle getting his head bumped. Repetitively. The driver of the Model-T mail truck, Alice, is chattering away, but he is trying to sleep, his head bobbing against the hard door as he bums a ride home. The road is leading them from South Dakota to Montana, where the Arbuckle family has lived and become a part of the land and the time (1916 through 1946), in a way that most transitory contemporaries never do. For this reason alone, I found it mesmerizing to join the Arbuckle family for a few "reading" years, vicariously experiencing the sense of being rooted in the soil of a ranch that has passed from generation to generation, as much a member of the family as its human members, imbued with history and family tradition.

Living rooted to land, however, does not prevent dysfunction from entering family dynamics. Indeed, it is the reason why much of the dysfunction enters: a rivalry, an ongoing and evolving competition for who will get the ranch. How does land and home get passed on? Which child gets it and which must find another home? These are the challenges that sometimes obsess and sometimes divide the Arbuckle family. Division lines occur when one son drowns, and no one can quite explain how or why, occasional suspicions pointing to another brother; that other brother becomes a womanizer, self-centered and cruel one moment, warm the next, like a Jekyll and Hyde, veering between lies, pretending a heroism he does not embody; a third, the narrator, is something of a lifelong bachelor, looking in on the relationships of others and sometimes craving to be on the inside, but mostly content to be but an observer from a safe distance, a baseball star one moment (some of Rowland's finer descriptions happen on the baseball field), but an avowed rancher most of the next. The patriarch of the family looks on and patiently keeps his hand on the reins, retaining control in gentle and unobtrusive manner. Mother has her ways, too, nurturing relationships, watching over her brood. Sons bring home wives, and some are good women, strong and soft simultaneously, while others seduce their way into the family, manipulating and lying without conscience and keeping their eye on the prize. Love happens, not along the straight and narrow, but too often proving to be less than originally hoped. Not the least of the love stories is the one between the Arbuckles and Montana. In fact, it is the love story that rules all the others.

Rowland's debut novel is a worthy one (it was published in 2002, and has since had a continuation in the just published "The Watershed Years"). He writes with that prairie peace that conveys distress in a critical scene without melodrama, sensuality without resorting to cheap graphic descriptions, emotional exchanges without bleeding into sappiness, all the while building tension with a keen sense of balance. Like the patriarch of the Arbuckle family, the author, too, holds a gentle rein on the family and unfolding scenes, maintaining literary skill in an array of scenes that would expose a lesser writer as beginner. Rowland is not that.

A pleasing read, and one that invites the reader to anticipate Rowland's next work. The closing scene of the novel is worth the entire read - a meaningful moment between man and land, the intimate connection between the two, poetically rendered, tender, satisfying to both mind and heart.

~ Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet

"In Open Spaces" is a lovely read and reminded me somewhat of the tales my parents told me about their own trials and tribulations in the Canadian Prairies during the depression years.

The story is told in the first person viewpoint of Blake Arbuckle as he lyrically explains his families' struggle to keep their Montana Ranch afloat through the difficult years of WWI and the "dirty thirties." The setting and the ranch are characters just as clearly defined as the members of this emotionally charged family. The story tends to be character-driven and you can't help but love some and hate others as is appropriate. At the end of the book you are ready for more about this complicated family and Blake's own tantalizing romance.

This novel hits the mark in several respects. It's a convincing coming-of-age book, a Montana Bildungsroman; it's also a wonderful evocation of a landscape and the human connection to it, and of an era. It's also a solid family saga.
The pacing is unhurried and the writing restrained---these are virtues in a book of this sort. Rowland succeeds in holding your attention from the beginning, however, not so much through a plot hook as through the creation of a sympathetic and interesting protagonist.
Anyone who's interested in well-crafted character-driven fiction should enjoy this book. It's a great beginning to what I hope will be a productive and successful career.

Friends ask me why I read fiction, since it's "not real," and I've always maintained that I get a finer appreciation for life, politics, geography, culture, what have you, including history, which comes alive - the facts as well as the feel of it - through a good story. That is the case with this novel of eastern Montana. It has classic American elements: baseball, the west, hard work ethic, a love story, and a big boisterous family, like old big boisterous families, with its own sense of ideosynractic mystery. The patient pace and brusque, delightful simplicity of the narrative calls to mind the oral storytelling tradition, a style that seems to match the stubborn resilience of the people and the land of the setting. I liked this book a heck of a lot.

Well-written and believable story of a ranching family in Montana. Convincing characters and vivid scenery pulled me into the book and kept me gripped till the end. Excellent descriptions of life on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere. Really enjoyed it, a great read.

With a style as sparse as the Montana setting, Rowland creates a simple story that starts slowly, gaining momentum and creating tension until his world has you in its grip. The land and weather become characters as powerful and yet as uncomplicated as the people. What is remarkable is that everything that happens is easily predictable, but when it happens, it's a surprise. It's a book without pretension or complexity, but one that engulfs you in a world of stunning clarity. The ever-present emotional upheavels rarely explode, but their presence is always felt. A truly wonderful book.