A Geography of Saints: A Memoir

by Penny Allen

A delightful western memoir, for readers who love Pam Houston and Melissa Banks.A Geography of Saints is a fascinating and clear-eyed account of the author's first year caretaking a horse ranch... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1581950284
• ISBN13: 9781581950281
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Zoland Books
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Edgy, clear-eyed memoir of a love affair, horses, Rajneeshis, Western water and timber issues

Penny Allen's memoir, A Geography of Saints, tells of a year in the life of two lovers who take a job caretaking a horse ranch on the eastern side of the Cascades in Oregon. What kept me turning the pages were her luminous and economical imagery and controlled tone, reminiscent of Annie Proulx. She maintains balance between several story lines involving struggles she and her lover have with clear-cutting, losing control of irrigation water, and with their inner landscapes. She handles sex and violence in vivid but restrained prose that left me in awe of the mare Coco, the Vietnam vet in the woods Buckner, the pedophile victim Billy, and Penny and her lover Peter. Allen's level stare takes us in concrete ways through an amazing collection of Western concerns over drying-up towns, weird newcomers to the high desert, and care for the land. An amazing book.

An Intimate Tale in a Broad Landscape

Set in a vivid and dramatic landscape, this memoir tells a story filled with honesty, humor, and courage. Allen observes with a keen eye. She takes on one of the great challenges for a writer, giving us not just the surface of the moments of a relationship but the deep undercurrents, both real and imagined, and succeeds with a grace that seems effortless. Allen's inner journey blends perfectly with the wild spaces, the free spirited horses, and the quirky human world, which is at once familiar, weird, and sobering.Allen is an engaging guide and companion. We can only hope she shares more of her journey with us.

Outside/inside

I was very taken by this wonderful real-life novel. Even if the reality level is relatively high, the author manages to turn it into something that transcends the documentary, the journalistic. By mixing many atfirst sight totally unrelated elements, in the end it turns out to be a novel about spirituality in daily life, or about how to see meaning in it.The location of the American North-West is much more than just animpressive backdrop. The scenery in the broadest sense of the word, including the population, is subject and metaphor at the same time.Penny Allen seems to focus on the "outside" of things, but interprets the "inside". All elements come together towards the very end, not only in a literary way, but in the way things sometimes do, in real life.I read this book with a lot of pleasure and satisfaction. It isintrospective, but at the same time describes mundane and sometimes gruesome events that happen in the real world. And it's funny, if you share the author's sense of humor.

West meets West

A GEOGRAPHY OF SAINTS is as strikingly contradictory as the contemporary West. Penny Allen's diary-like account is freewheeling and contemplative, sweet and acerbic, tender and tough. It is a bravely public and intensely personal modern memoir which reveals that even in Paradise - especially in Paradise, perhaps - smugness begets arrogance and arrogance begets abuse. This is not, however, a cynical book. Ultimately, it affirms the cyclical nature of pettiness and largesse, love and loss, life and death, yielding an unsentimental, hard-won awareness that sad endings can be fresh starts.

Stunning language, complex rollicking tale

Though the title tells the potential reader to slow down - that this book can't be read on one level - nevertheless its dramatic true tales propel you through it. Allen plays land traumas off human traumas during Rajneeshee Oregon to move her story into deeper stratas of each. This is the kind of book I seek out to read, one that explores who we are, how we're dealing with each other, our environs.... entertaining and engaging us through gripping images and thrilling phrases.