Shopping Bag
My AccountIn conjunction with yesterday’s profile of Molly Gloss, here is a spotlight on the books she has authored:
Product Description:
In the winter of 1917 many of the young ranch hands in this remote Eastern Oregon county have been called away to war. When 19-year-old Martha Lessen shows up at George Bliss’s doorstep looking for work breaking horses, George glimpses beneath her showy rodeo costume a shy young woman with a serious knowledge of horses, and he hires her on. Martha’s unusual, quiet way of breaking horses soon wins her additional work among several of George Bliss’s neighbors, and over the course of the winter she helps out a German family whose wagon and horses have tipped off a narrow road into a ravine; she gentles a horse for a man who knows he is dying—a last gift to his young son; and she clashes with a hired hand who has been abusing horses with casual cruelty. Against the backdrop of a horrifying modern war, Martha gradually comes to feel enveloped by a sense of community and family she’s never had before. And eventually, against her best intentions to lead a solitary cowboy life, she falls in love (mollygloss.com).
Reviews:
“Truly one of the best books you’ll ever read.” —Jane Kirkpatrick
“In all of Molly Gloss’ work, lyric descriptions and unforgettable characters are supported by an open, wide-ranging intelligence and not at all undone by dry wit and an open heart. The Hearts of Horses is a shining example of Molly Gloss’ gifts.” —Amy Bloom
Product Description:
Charlotte Bridger Drummond is an outrageous early-twentieth century feminist, a cigar-smoking, trousered, bicycling, scandal-embracing mother of five sons who supports her household in the Columbia River town of Skamokawa, Washington, by writing adventure stories and scientific romances featuring intrepid girl heroes. When a friend’s granddaughter goes lost from a remote logging camp, Charlotte travels into the mountains to join the search, and to investigate the truth of a report that the child was abducted by a Mountain Giant—a legendary creature Charlotte herself has made use of in her stories. The search takes her into a wild landscape of lava sinkholes and ancient forest, where she makes astonishing discoveries, comes to misadventure, and encounters human malignancy. When Charlotte herself becomes lost in the dark and tangled woods, she falls into the company of a family of real or delusionary Mountain Giants, and embarks on an extraordinary journey into the wilderness that lies at the center of the human heart (mollygloss.com).
Reviews:
“Bold and Inventive.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Stunning.” —Denver Post
“Gloss’s exhilarating tale cajoles us into asking what it means to be alive on this teeming sphere.” —Chicago Tribune
“A masterpiece.” —Kirkus Reviews
Product Description:
The Dusty Miller, an enormous ring-shaped biosphere towed by an immense solar sail, is coming to the end of its 175 year voyage in search of a better home. But the new world they’ve arrived at is cold and inhospitable; and the Miller’s people have grown comfortable in their self-contained world, its rural shipboard society based on Quaker principles of governance by consensus. While Juko and her family struggle with their own trials and losses, the community faces the death of a sailmender and members of a landing party, as well as a plague that sweeps through the ship. And they all must face the question of whether to attempt settlement of the harsh new planet, or to relaunch the aging and slowly deteriorating Dusty Miller so that another generation might find a more hospitable place. It is, in fact, this same question that caused the Quakers to leave a dying Earth and its oppressive governments in the first place: If an environment is not quite to your liking, do you abandon it in search of another? Make plans to alter it? Or seek ways to accommodate to it (mollygloss.com)?
Reviews:
“A breathtaking, compassionate novel.” —Universe
“A solid, rich and dense accomplishment, and it reminds us anew of what frontiers are really good for in science fiction.” —Locus
Product Description:
Lydia Bennett Sanderson is a hardship-honed widow homesteading in the backcountry of Oregon in 1895. Her neighbors are few: Tim and Blue are a couple of men trying to make a go of it on their small hardscrabble ranch. Evelyn Walker is a young, lonely wife rearing her children in daunting isolation. And a trio of rootless cowboys take up squatters rights in the mountains, and begins killing and baiting cattle to poison wolves for the bounty. While Lydia toils into the summer, building fence, digging ditches, repairing her sorry little homestead cabin, Tim and Blue engage in a deadly spoilers game with the wolvers. One of the rootless losers is dangerous, and Tim finds revenge a sour need. As the months pass, there is good and ill fortune, the exchange of fair-and-square favors, and, at the close, a long road back from trial and grief (mollygloss.com).
Reviews:
“A powerful novel of struggle and loss.” —Dallas Morning News
“A rare treat to find characters we can care about this much.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“A classic of its kind.” —Los Angeles Times
Product Description:
Vren, a young boy who can communicate with animals, is exiled to the forest where the Shadowed people live, and begins a new life with another outcast, Rusche, a fatherly man who can control the local weather. When Rusche disappears, Vren and his wolf friend Trim set out in search of him; and together with an old woman, Shel, they embark on a dangerous and exhausting journey. When they discover that a spellbinder holds Rusche and other outcasts in thrall, it seems that even Vren cannot resist the spellbinder. But in the end his love for Rusche helps him find a way to free them all from the spellbinder’s grip (mollygloss.com).
Reviews:
“Thought-provoking and satisfying.” —Booklist
“This is superior fantasy.” —Kirkus Reviews
