{ "item_title" : "The Winter She Stayed", "item_author" : [" Tamsin Orrell "], "item_description" : "Her husband is buried on the bench above the spring. The land agent gives her until November. The snow comes on the eighteenth.Oregon, 1874. Ada Muir is twenty-six years old, three months a widow, and the sole occupant of a hundred and sixty acres in the Blue Mountains that she does not yet own. Her husband proved up nothing but eleven rounds of an unroofed cabin before a leaning fir took him. The law says a widow may finish what her husband began - but only if she stays. Every night. On that ground. For twenty more months.Everyone tells her she cannot winter alone at four thousand feet. A courteous land agent named Calvin Prue offers four hundred dollars and the plain truth: he has wintered these mountains, and it cost him two toes. When she refuses, he files a contest alleging she has abandoned the claim - and the one thing the law demands she prove is the one thing no one was there to see.What follows is a season-by-season account of a woman learning a mountain: a ridgepole raised with one mule and a snatch block, nine stitches sewn into the back of her own left hand by lamplight, thirty-one below with the mercury gone into the bulb, a fire line plowed at a dead run, and a Cayuse family who have used that draw for twenty years and who teach her, without ceremony, that she has been camping on top of a full pantry with the door shut.WHAT'S INSIDE- A literary frontier survival novel in close third person, told across two winters, 1874 to 1876- A strong, exacting, wholly believable heroine - no rescues, no romance she did not choose- Antagonists that are weather, isolation, hunger and paperwork, not villains- Cayuse neighbours written with dignity, specificity and names of their own- Homestead law, land office hearings and final proof rendered accurately and dramatically- Lyrical, sensory prose about snow, cedar, camas, smoke and cold- A full Historical Note separating the documented from the invented- Reading group questions for book clubs", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/80/315/531/9803155318_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "56.40", "online_price" : "56.40", "our_price" : "56.40", "club_price" : "56.40", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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