The Farmer's Daughter

by Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison's fifteen works of fiction have established him as one of the most beloved and popular authors in American fiction. His last novel, The English Major, was a National Indie Bestseller, a New York Times Book Review notable, and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Harrison's latest collection of novellas, The Farmer's Daughter, finds him writing at the height of his powers, and in fresh and audacious new directions. The three stories in The Farmer's Daughter are as different as they are unforgettable. Written in the voice of a home-schooled fifteen-year-old girl in rural Montana, the title novella is an uncompromising, beautiful tale of an extraordinary character whose youth intersects with unexpected brutality, and the reserves she must draw on to make herself whole. In another, Harrison's beloved recurring character Brown Dog, still looking for love, escapes from Canada back to the States on the tour bus of an Indian rock band called Thunderskins. And finally, a retired werewolf, misdiagnosed with a rare blood disorder brought on by the bite of a Mexican hummingbird, attempts to lead a normal life but is nevertheless plagued by hazy, feverish episodes of epic lust, physical appetite, athletic exertions, and outbursts of violence under the full moon. The Farmer's Daughter is a memorable portrait of three decidedly unconventional American lives. With wit, poignancy, and an unbounded love for his characters, Jim Harrison has again reminded us why he is one of the most cherished and important authors at work today.

• ISBN10: 0802119344
• ISBN13: 9780802119346
• Publish Date: 15 December 2009
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 30 March 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 308
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

“When you lifted the lid a bit the natural world, including ourselves, offered as much darkness in human terms as light. To look at it with any clarity you certainly had to attempt to look at it through the perceptions of a million-plus other species.”

Take what you will from the fact that it’s Jim Harrison who writes a fifteen-year-old girl (Sarah in “The Farmer’s Daughter”) that feels more like myself at fifteen than any teenage girl I’ve read. Scared, solitary, badass, lonesome. She loves The Misfits, the wilderness, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald. She’s camped out in her truck to shoot a rapist and wishes the book she had with her was Elmore Leonard. It’s my language, my compass, and if some of her experiences aren’t my own, her attitudes toward them largely are.

So if that’s what stories are good for, to find ourselves, to glimpse our reflection, then this was at least a little sliver of me. Even the connective tissue to all three stories is Patsy Cline, her version of “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” It may be Montana, it may be Canada, Michigan, and, briefly, Italy, but as the homesick Brown Dog puts it: It was never the state, he thought, but the terrain. This is my terrain.

A high four stars to the title story. Another four for the return of my dear, dim, lecherous, sweet Brown Dog in “Brown Dog Redux,” and a low three for the wolfish “The Games of Night,” although it had my favorite lines.

“I had a disturbing thought, saying to myself, ‘It’s not you or me but us,’ including the dead calf off to the side and the bright blue sky above us.”