Heartland

`[A] powerful message of class bias ... A potent social and economic message [is] embedded within an affecting memoir.' - Kirkus, starred review `Candid and courageous ... Smarsh's raw and intimate narrative exposes a country of economic inequality that has 'failed its children.'' - Publishers Weekly, starred review `You might think that a book about growing up on a poor Kansas farm would qualify as 'sociology,' and Heartland certainly does ... But this book is so much more than even the best sociology. It is poetry - of the wind and snow, the two-lane roads running through the wheat, the summer nights when work-drained families drink and dance under the prairie sky.' - Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed `Sarah Smarsh - tough-minded and rough-hewn - draws us into the real lives of her family, barely making it out there on the American plains. There's not a false note. Smarsh, as a writer, is Authentic with a capital A ... This is just what the world needs to hear.' - George Hodgman, author of Bettyville `Sarah Smarsh is one of America's foremost writers on class. Heartland is about an impossible dream for anyone born into poverty - a leap up in class, doubly hard for a woman. Smarsh's journey from a little girl into adulthood in Kansas speaks to tens of thousands of girls now growing up poor in what so many dismiss as 'flyover country.' Heartland offers a fresh and riveting perspective on the middle of the nation all too often told through the prism of men.' - Dale Maharidge, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning And Their Children After Them