A Sandhills Ballad

Ladette Randolph is director of the nationally renowned journal Ploughshares and a Distinguished-Publisher-in-Residence in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing program at Emerson College, Boston. A former acquiring editor and interim director at University of Nebraska Press, she is the author of the short story collection This Is Not the Tropics and editor of two anthologies, A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers and The Big Empty: Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers. She is the recipient of the Pushcart prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation grant, two Nebraska Book Awards, the Virginia Faulkner Award from Prairie Schooner, and she has been reprinted in Best New American Voices.

This is good, old-fashioned storytelling at its best, and Mary Rasmussen will live forever in your hearts as a young woman who faces enormous tests and survives in order to protect those she loves. Stubborn, determined, and loyal, Mary makes a life that requires both imagination and grit and you end up rooting for her every inch of the way. Randolph is revisioning the American plains in this novel, telling the stories of the women who struggle side-by-side with men on their Sandhills ranches and in their small towns. These are people of great courage and even greater integrity, who love and lose and love again, as undaunted as their pioneer forebears in their efforts to make a life for themselves and future generations.... ""Randolph writes truthfully of the Nebraska Sandhills, a harsh land that exacts a brutal price for those who choose to love it. Having lived there, one never truly leaves, as Mary Rasmussen discovers, it etches its beautiful scar on body and soul."" - Jonis Agee, author of The River Wife