The Story Behind This Book
Elizabeth Jensen, a Quaker rancher who started a ranch on the Colorado Plains during the Dust Bowl, was the inspiration for my novel Plain Language. When I started interviewing her, she was in her mid-90s and I was half a century younger. I went to her study to fetch a large box of memorabilia, and she tried to wrest it from me, saying, "Let me get that. You'll hurt your back."
Praise and Reviews
By | Deb Sanders (Jackson, Wyoming United States) - |
By | "disheveledprofessor" (the home of the Blue Angels) - |
Alfred are simple people, hardworking and not given to flights of fancy, communicating indeed in plain language. Wright's skill is apparent in the fact that Virginia and Alfred meet one disaster after another and yet the reader feels sustained, not drained. Many readers may be startled at how "plain" and filled with drudgery life was in the still-living past -- and yet how spirit-sustaining.
The themes of this book include: the importance of communicating in developing relationships; the love we deprive ourselves of by making judgments; the value of hard work in developing self-esteem. Toward the end of the novel, Alfred reflects to himself "... somewhere along the way you realize the achievement is not the goal itself -- the achievement is the person you've become in trying to reach the goal."
I highly recommend this novel.
By | Sunshine Girl (California) - |
Plain Language won an award from the Western Writer's of America in 2004. I gave the book to a few friends and they all loved it.
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