Bootstrapper

July 15, 2013
Separated from her soon-to-be ex-husband, Link (Isadore's Secret) is suddenly living the life of a homesteader. Through adversities and tight finances, and with humor and biting wit, Link chronicles her struggle to provide for her three sons and hang on to her little farmstead. When bills pile up, lucking into prize money from a zucchini contest turns out to be a major windfall. As the cold Michigan winter sets in, there is no money for the heating bill and the clan scrounges the roadsides for firewood, until the summer arrives when they can tend to their garden and rear a flock of chickens. The realities of living off the land, though, require determination, as "food gathering methods...deviate from a grocery store, a grocery cart, and a checkbook." Through it all, rather than becoming overwhelmed by desperate circumstances, Link perseveres. With resilience, resourcefulness, and plain stubbornness, she manages to hold everything together, all while keeping her family's pride and dignity intact. Her experience as a single parent will resonate with any single mom and her story of what it's like to raise your own food out of necessity serves as a cautionary tale to anyone who has ever romantically dreamed of "living the simple life."

May 15, 2013
A woman's journey of survival against many odds. "Nobody likes a drunk, soon-to-be-divorced, in-debt, swollen-eyed, single mother farmeress," writes Link (Isadore's Secret: Sin, Murder and Confession in a Northern Michigan Town, 2009, etc.) in her down-to-earth, often humorous memoir of her effort to hold onto her farm and her three sons. With "Mr. Wonderful" (her ex) living just across the street, the author chronicles a year's worth of struggles as sole breadwinner, mother and farmer. In a partially refurbished old farmhouse, Link battled the monthly cycle of bills and the impossible task of feeding three teenage boys on her vegetable garden, one pig and a free year's supply of day-old bread, courtesy of the giant-zucchini contest she won. With the death of her beloved horse, her dreams of one kind of life were replaced with another vision and a loneliness that she filled with work and the need to survive. Whether gardening, stealing firewood or shoveling snow, the foursome eked their way through the lack of heat, food and money, juxtaposing days of intense labor with fun-filled moments like cooking marshmallows indoors in the fireplace or finding the perfect Christmas tree. As winter turned to spring and the threat of losing everything hung over her head, Link was forced to make difficult decisions. But tenacity and perseverance prove life can be good, filled with simple joys such as watching her sons grow into hardworking individuals, eating food straight from the ground and collecting eggs from her own hens. And if romance appears at odd moments, so much the better. A moving account of how one woman's willpower saved her home and her family.

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June 1, 2013
In a heart-wrenching, heartwarming, and invigorating memoir, author and farmer Link struggles following her divorce to hold on to the life she had built. Link is not, as her ex-husband had taunted, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but she is resilient, resourceful, and determined in her efforts to save the farm and make a living for herself and her three sons. Although they are facing distressingly difficult times, they soldier on through calamities of all sizes, often finding unorthodox solutions to such unusual problems as a broken freezer that stores all their winter meat, an overly amorous rooster, and a Christmas tree utterly lacking in the proper equipment. Link's pride in her sons and the life they have made shines throughout the book and is obviously well deserved. Neither sugarcoated nor wallowing in self-pity, Link's storytelling is as tough, honest, and unyielding as one would expect from a Michigan farmer. Her account, told with humor and panache, of pulling oneself up after disappointment and loss will appeal to the bootstrapper in all of us.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)