Lost without the river : a memoir
(Book)

A writer examines her childhood in the rural Midwest in this debut memoir."If you ever come to these gently rolling hills in northeastern South Dakota," writes Scoblic early in her book, "with the farmlands nestled near two clear lakes, decorated with the twisting of the Whetstone River, late May would be the time to make the trip." In this landbeautiful and hard in different waysthe author began life as Barbara Hoffbeck, the seventh child of Roman Catholic farmers who had struggled through the Depression. Growing up in the 1940s, Scoblic experienced a childhood that was in some ways picturesque: picking the strawberries that grew on the family's property and catching snapping turtles with one of her many brothers. But there were tragedies, too, as when the author's oldest sister, who had no control "over her muscles" and lived in a crib, died when Scoblic was 7 years old. In addition, two of the author's siblings were sent to live with her grandparents. Scoblic wanted more for herself than the difficult road of her parents, and she eventually went to college, served in the Peace Corps, and settled permanently in New York City. Yet the lives of her parents, siblings, and extended family were never far from her mind, and this volume of reminiscences charts not just the stories of her youth, but also the ways those things have shaped and weighed on her throughout her adulthood. The author's prose is lyrical and highly observant, offering surprising, incidental details, as in this passage about sitting in church: "Through those narrow openings, scents of grass and wild clover filtered in, along with a few flies and box elder bugs. Those bugs gathered in great clusters on the sides of buildings every August. When viewed up close, they displayed an art deco design of slate gray and orange." Featuring family photographs, the memoir is infused with a subtle melancholy, which is perhaps to be expected in a book about a place and people now gone. But in the folds of the digressions and anecdotes readers will find an unmistakable joy on the part of Scoblic: the joy of returning to a place, having left it. The joy of carrying it within her wherever she goes.A shaggy but powerful work about a South Dakota family. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A remembered "home" exerts an inexorable pull throughout this debut memoir. Scoblic, the youngest of seven children born to a South Dakota farmer and his steadfast wife during years of Depression-era hardship and drought, provides a series of verbal snapshots of what life was like in that rugged yet beautiful terrain plagued by intense winters, floods, and the potential disasters of family farms. Scoblic recounts frequent episodes in her somewhat strained relationship with her taciturn father that contrast with descriptions of her mother's almost saintly efforts to keep the Hoffbeck children safe, fed, and appropriately clothed for all events the devout Catholic family would attend. Scoblic's yearning to escape her confined environment resulted in a tour with the Peace Corps and, ultimately, relocation to New York City. This late-in-life reminiscence of a way of life that has all but disappeared provides Scoblic with an opportunity to explore how the place she left a half century ago still seems like home. VERDICT Readers seeking a firsthand, contemporary narrative of bygone agrarian life may be interested in Scoblic's family-centered account of her early years in South Dakota.—Thérèse Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY (c) Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.