Description: "Unflinching. . . . A sense of mourning underlies [Blunt's] account, and she honors the land that she still loves by making us intimate with its smallest details." The New Yorker "In this assured and moving memoir, Blunt chronicles the warts-and-all realities of modern ranch life. . . . Remarkable." Outside "Staunch and unblinking. . . . If there is a trace of sentimentality [in Breaking Clean] I couldn't find it, which is why this book is such a valuable addition to the literature of place and the literature of passage." Bill McKibben, The Washington Post "[Judy Blunt] has turned the memories of her childhood and young adulthood into a beautifully written memoir that is a meditation on how land and her life will always be intertwined ." Miriam Wolf, The San Francisco Chronicle "In Breaking Clean, Blunt strikes a delightfully tense, unsteady balance and . . . like an accomplished bucking bronco rider . . . masterfully maintains it throughout a wild-ride of a memoir." Los Angeles Times "Riveting . . . In its precise, arresting descriptions of a working farm and its careful re-creation of how Blunt ultimately came to break free, this masterful debut is utterly strange, suspenseful and surprising." Time Out New York "[An] astonishing literary debut, a dramatic and heartbreaking memoir." Elle "Hopefully, Blunt will keep honing her keen and poetic awareness, steely candor, and commanding storytelling skills and continue telling the true story of women in the West." Booklist "City slickers take heed: here's the real lowdown on the ranching lifefrom a woman's perspective. Judy blunt's new memoir Breaking Clean debunks the romance surrounding the American West's most archetypal way of life." BookPage "With a voice so authentic she seems to have grown up out of the ground itself, Judy Blunt gives us the true West, swept clear of the long haze of myth. Breaking Clean is a stunner, an incredible story told by a writer of unbelievable skill." Pete Fromm, author of Indian Creek Chronicles "One's own life into words is perhaps the most daunting geography a writer ever faces. But swooping into moments of her own past as if by sorcery, Judy Blunt in these harrowing pages of life as a young ranch wife on the Montana Highline memorably comes to terms with an old and hard horizon." Ivan Doig, author of This House of Sky "Judy Blunt lived in a beloved country among beloved people. She grew up knowing blizzards and good horses, working cattle all day and then getting dinner on the table, impassable roads to town and babies with raging feversa resolute country girl who became a ranch wife on the shortgrass plains of Montana. And she tells of leaving, the price of insisting on her right to fashion her own life. Breaking Clean is vivid and compelling, a classical American memoir." William Kittredge, author of The Nature of Generosity "A lover of land in a land almost unlivable, a natural matriarch born and bred to patriarchy, a seer of complex truths among admirers of terse adages, Judy Blunt seems, at a glance, a classic misfit. But in this miracle of memoir she transcends the misfit's rancor to tell a story heroic, from beginning to end, for its perfect pitch. Breaking Clean is not mercilessly but mercifully honest. Doing what it must to free its stunning song, it leaves the culture, the land, and even the husband it rejects their dignity. It is a masterpiece." David James Duncan, author of

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