Donna Recommends

In 1916 two society girls in a spirit of adventure head west to teach school in tiny Elkhead, Colorado. The experience changed them forever. Using letters and diaries, the author captures the eagerness and joy of the two young women as they learn to teach all ages in a one-room schoolhouse, make friends with an array of frontier characters, and ride their horses in waist-deep snow.

Rawicz was arrested by the Russians and shipped off to Camp 303 in Siberia in 1941. It’s in Camp 303 that the heart of his story begins—an escape on foot with five companions leading to a 3,000 mile trek across Siberia, China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet over the Himalayas to British India. How could this be possible? How could anyone survive? His tenacity for life and freedom is astonishing. The book is written in a straight-forward, understated style which intensifies its power. Rawicz had never spoken of his ordeal until a newspaper reporter sought him out at his home in England to ask if he had seen the elusive yeti in the Himalayas. This is when his full story emerged.

Walls' first memory was when she was three, standing at a stove stirring a pot, and her dress caught fire. And so begins the mesmerizing tale of feckless, vagabond parents and their children. What lifts this book above other stories of bleak childhoods is its even tone. Walls conveys no bitterness-she has come to terms with her parents and her life.