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Miracle Country

A Memoir

Audiobook
286 of 286 copies available
286 of 286 copies available
Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero. Kendra's family raised their children to thrive in this harsh landscape, forever at the mercy of wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Most of all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. But it came at a price. When Kendra was six, her mother was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, and she died when Kendra was sixteen. Her family fell apart, even as her father tried to keep them together. Kendra took flight from her bereft family, escaping to the enemy city of Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis, land of all trees, no deserts, no droughts, full lakes, water everywhere you look. But after years of avoiding the pain of her hometown, she realized that she had to go back, that the desert was the only place she could live. Like Wild, Miracle Country is a story of flight and return, bounty and emptiness, and the true meaning of home. But it also speaks to the ravages of climate change and its permanent destruction of the way of life in one particular town.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 25, 2020
      Essayist Atleework recalls her family roots and explores the history of California’s arid Eastern Sierras in her ambitious, beautiful debut. Nearly two centuries of conflict over land, water, and individual rights flow through parallel stories involving the region’s first inhabitants, the Paiutes indigenous peoples, and ditch digger turned public works czar William Mulholland, who, beginning in the 1880s, drained the area’s rivers and lakes to provide water to distant Los Angeles. Atleework writes of her parents—jack-of-all-trades father Robert Atlee and educator mother Jan Work—who married and settled in Swall Meadows, population 200, in Owens Valley, a once-fertile area laid waste by Mulholland’s aqueduct system. Atleework’s childhood “on this obsidian edge of California” reads as mythic, with her bedroom opening onto towering Mount Tom and Wheeler Crest, and her loving parents as everyday gods who offered protection, especially during harsh winters: “We were never quite safe; we were never quite in danger.” She writes about her mother’s cancer death when she was 16, weaving in accounts of beauty from Mary Austin, a late-19th-century Owens Valley writer captivated by the desert, as well as of Paiute centenarian Hoavadunuki, who shares with her his story of white settlers’ desecration of the land in the 1920s. Atleework’s remarkable prose renders the ordinary wondrous and firmly puts this overlooked region of California onto the map.

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  • English

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