Road Tripping Across the USA Mini Reading Challenge: North Dakota

A rural expatriate’s struggle to reconcile family, home, love, and faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people

Melanie Hoffert longs for her North Dakota childhood home, with its grain trucks and empty main streets. A land where she imagines standing at the bottom of the ancient lake that preceded the prairie: crop rows become the patterned sand ripples of the lake floor; trees are the large alien plants reaching for the light; and the sky is the water’s vast surface, reflecting the sun. Like most rural kids, she followed the out-migration pattern to a better life. The prairie is a hard place to stay—particularly if you are gay, and your home state is the last to know.

Though generations have passed, the town of Pluto continues to be haunted by the murder of a farm family.

Evelina Harp—part Ojibwe, part white—is an ambitious young girl whose grandfather, a repository of family and tribal history, harbors knowledge of the violent past. And Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who bears witness, understands the weight of historical injustice better than anyone. Through the distinct and winning voices of three unforgettable narrators, the collective stories of two interwoven communities ultimately come together to reveal a final wrenching truth.

A Pioneer Woman's Journey of Courage, Grit and Love

Bess Parker is only 21 years old when she sets out by herself in 1908, leaving the safety of her childhood home for southwestern North Dakota to establish a homestead. And it takes all the strength she can muster to succeed—facing the perils of the vast prairie, making her homestead productive, conquering the dangers of the frontier, flirting with romance, struggling with the emotional needs of her heart and body, and meeting the challenges of life on the prairie.

Into the Wind

As a single 21-year-old, Bess Parker ventured forth alone, which was virtually unheard of in 1908, into far southwestern North Dakota to establish a homestead, where she became a successful rancher. Her journey demonstrated her strength and steely will as it was filled with challenges and heartache. After kicking her drunk and abusive husband to the curb in 1916, Bess found herself raising four small children alone in a sod house on the pioneer prairie.