Marchlands

by Karla Kuban

Book Overview

Sophie Behr is 15 and pregnant on the sheep ranch where she lives with her bitter, compulsively religious mother, when she embarks on a journey from childhood to adulthood and finds new strength and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684831651
• ISBN13: 9780684831657
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Plot and interpretation

Most good literature requires a reader's maturity and intelligence to arrive at certain conclusions without being told everything. Thinking, relating, concluding, going forward. Marchlands is not so much a plot novel as it is a novel of language and internal strife. It tells of Sophie's survival. The reader can come to his or her own conclusions about moral rights and wrongs, but in the end can the reader relate to the existential questions and answers of Sophie's life as she changes?

A McCarthyesque novel of no small proportion.

In sparse, yet poetic prose, first time novelist, Karla Kuban tells of love and a secret so dark that it has kept the members of a family strangers for years and threatens, in its retelling, to rip the family apart altogether. With her 17-hand, part Clydesdale, Pablo, 15-year-old Sophie Behr rides the thousand acres in southeastern Wyoming on which her family settled generations ago to raise sheep. Her best friends are her horse, and Demetrio, the handsome 18-year-old sheepherder from Guadalajara who has fathered the baby she now carries. But all is not idyllic. Sophie's mother, a God-loving hypocrite of gargantuan proportions, drags Sophie before the town pastor for her indiscretions and screams at her to beg his forgiveness. Sophie sees the man of God this way: "Pastor Fabila's face is bunched up and pained-looking as if he has gas." Sophie's cat-torturing older brother is in Vietnam; sometimes Sophie hopes he won't return. And buried within the seams of the story is a family secret so powerful that 11 years ago, when Sophie was only 4, it caused her father to leave home. When her mother's cruelty causes Sophie to seek out her absent father somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, she discovers that sometimes the truth hurts more than lies ever will. I couldn't help but love Sophie, and root for her, and hope that novelist Kuban will write a sequel to this compelling tale of love and intrigue.

Fiercely Good/Nature and Soul

I read Hal Espen's review of Marchlands in the August issue of Outdoor Magazine. All I can say is that this girl-woman is brave and honorable, and I have to agree with Mr. Espen one hundred percent: "This graceful first novel is the story of an eventful year in the life of its tough-minded narrator, 15 year-old Sophie Behr . . . this young woman's self-possession and keen awareness of the beauty and strangeness of life carry her through her many trials. Kuban does marvelous but unflashy things with the prose in this book." Agree, agree, agree. Tough, sensitive, wisdom beyond her years, and in a first-person voice that knocked my socks off.

Literature at its Best! A wonderfully written page turner

Marchlands passes the test of all great books. It leaves you wanting for more - much more - when the last page is turned. Great scenery, great characters and a heartfelt story. Loved it! Some advice to Ms. Kuban: Hurry your butt up and write another book. I can't wait!

A Poignant and Powerful Novel

Karla Kuban reinvents the coming-of-age tale with a fresh purity and directness in this compelling narrative that follows pregnant 15 year old Sophie Behr on her quest to uncover and understand the events that drove her father away from the family. Kuban crafts a powerful story which is at once a spare and evocative portrait of the threshold crossing from adolescence to adulthood. And although set in the 1960's, the book's themes of accountability and forgiveness are contemporary in the most profound sense. Juxtaposed to the deeply complex characters of Sophie and her parents is the wild simple beauty of the Southwest - which Kuban describes in extraordinary evocations of landscape. In her use of imagery she has attained a genuine lyric freedom, and creates a vivid sense of place. As one might expect of a Pushcart Prize Winner, Kuban writes with a beautiful eye for detail and a poetic phrasing. But what truly sets Kuban apart is her fascination with those areas at the boundaries of human nature. Her ability to unflinchingly include the shadow side of her characters, without a moralizing or judgmental tone, gives a depth to her writing which is rare. Although she has been compared to writers as diverse as Charles Frazier, Cormac McCarthy and Pam Houston, Kuban's voice is an original. I highly recommend this book, which is ultimately about both the journey and the destination.