A Sandhills Ballad (review)

Mary Rasmussen wakes in a hospital bed to discover grief so deep and life-changing that she feels lost. In the course of A Sandhills Ballad, she loses still more. Though still in her twenties, her life seems a trap.

Woe to the novel in which God appears, but a pious prig can be a fascinating character. A looming presence throughout A Sandhills Ballad is Ward Hamilton, an end-of-days minister in the small town of Custer City, Nebraska. Desperate to escape her grief, Mary decides to give his religion a try, marries him, and the trap shuts.

A Sandhills Ballad depicts a landscape previously populated with stereotypes: tough, taciturn, hard-working men and indomitable women who cook, bake, and quilt. Randolph's characters peel back the stereotypes, all the while exploring the truths and half-truths of the iconic Sandhills family, feisty, fecund, and invincible. Mary makes decisions that her family recognizes as mistakes, but being indomitable, she goes her own way, directly into being dominated.

When is a novel a ballad? When it moves rapidly, when its main character suffers from some flaw, and when trouble comes to town. Defying the temptation to lyricize landscape, Randolph gives Custer City a nasty neighbor: an expanding feedlot, from which stench blows into the city. Mary must choose her Pharisee hubby and unhappy church or the affections and allegiances of her past. It takes years and an unexpected romance to provoke her to reclaim a life of her own, and to do so, she must depend again on her family. The story is hers, the glory is theirs.

In clear lines and sympathetic tone, A Sandhills Ballad is a book that will make its readers grateful for what matters most, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse.