ALA Booklist (Mon Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2005)

Joern intricately weaves together a compelling family saga and a beautifully rendered paean to the land her characters love and are struggling to preserve. Rooted in the Nebraska Sandhills, Toby, an aging widow, lives with her older sister in the house their parents built before the Depression. Toby invites Lila, her pregnant 16-year-old granddaughter, to stay with them until her baby is born, in part to assuage the long-standing rift between Toby and Lila's mother. While sifting through her feelings about her pregnancy, impending motherhood, and adoption, Lila simultaneously begins digging into family secrets, including the death of Toby's first love in an accident caused by her father and the son Toby gave up for adoption months later. Surrounding the intertwined details of this family's loves, jealousies, and regrets like a cocoon is their emotional bond with the land itself e land they're in danger of losing to a ranching conglomerate. Joern's lyrical and painterly descriptions of the vast Sandhills are the perfect backdrop for this subtle drama.

Kirkus Reviews

A small-scale but emotionally rich first novel about an unwed pregnant teen spending the summer with her grandmother in the hardscrabble Nebraska Sandhills. Lila's flight-attendant mother sends Lila from Minneapolis to her grandmother Toby's Nebraska farm to wait out the last months of her unwanted pregnancy. While Lila struggles with her pregnancy and her decision to put her unborn baby up for adoption, her visit stirs up long-simmering tensions for Toby, Toby's bitter sister Gertie and George, who has worked on the farm for more than 50 years. Seventy-two and long widowed, Toby is no fawning grandma. Tough but loving, she still rides her horse regularly and can work up a man's passions. It soon comes to light that although he never acted on his feelings, Gertie's husband, now suffering from Alzheimer's, was quietly in love with Toby for most of his marriage . . . not exactly a recipe for good sibling relations. Also in love with Toby long, long ago was George's younger brother, David. When Toby was Lila's age, she and David tried to run away together. Her father chased them in his car, shot and killed David, then crashed the car, accidentally killing his wife. Toby bore David's child, who was cared for by distant relatives until he died at 12 of leukemia. Since then, George has secretly acted as Toby's guardian angel, even through her happy marriage and the adoption of Lila's mother. His unspoken love makes for irresistible reading. Despite Lila's small romances and dramas, her story never rises to the dramatic or romantic energy of these oldsters (think Paul Newman with Joanne Woodward). Toward the end, the plot wobbles as the author recognizes, but only partially deflates, the cliche inherent in having a mortgage-holder show up, threatening to sell the farm out from under Toby. A resonant love story, whatever the age of the lovers.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Toby Jenkins, now 72, has been living all her life in the same ornate Sears, Roebuck farmhouse in the Nebraska Sandhills her father bought for her mother back in 1920. For now, Toby aims to stay there with her cranky self-righteous sister, Gertie, despite the local weasel banker's pressure to sell. Toby is widowed, resolute and land-scarred; a string of family deaths, tragedies and abandonments have left Toby and Gertie with no one to pass the place on to. Then Toby's 16-year-old pregnant granddaughter, Lila, arrives from Minneapolis. At first the unloved, metal-studded Lila, the child of Toby's adoptive daughter, a bitter airline stewardess, is surly and ungrateful, but eventually her curiosity about country rituals and her grandmother's life leads her to the family cemetery and to archives harboring long-buried family secrets. Playwright Joern's characters are as stern as the land, and the world of her debut novel is sturdy and memorable. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Sept.)