Heart Mountain

This is one of my all time favorite books. I've recommended it to more people than I can remember, especially if they don't know much about the internment of the Japanese Americans during WWII. My husband doesn't read much fiction, but I convinced him to read this book and he loved it. I talked my nephew into reading it when he was eighteen and he did too. It is so well-written and so believable that my only disappointment is that Ms. Ehrlich hasn't written more fiction.

This is one of the better modern novels about Wyoming cowboys I read last winter. The others include J Robert Lennon's "On The Night Plain"; James Galvin's "Fencing The Sky"; Ralph Beer's "The Blind Corral";Mark Spragg's "The Fruit Of Stone"; Annie Proulx' book of short stories, "Close Range"; and David Long's book of short stories "Blue Spruce". I might also include Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize -winning novel "Angle Of Repose" and the last two novels in John Nichols' "New Mexico Trilogy" which I read last year. In countless ways they recreate the myth of the West, with some important modern modifications. The first six of these have some remarkable similarities in theme and content. All of them discuss cattle or sheep ranching and the life of the cowboy and family life on the plains, including many passages devoted to the skills of horsemanship, those especially harsh Wyoming winters, and many fine details of ranch life & environment. They also all bring into focus the cowboy's highly individualistic and quirky personality and his unfortunate tendency towards alcoholism. The question of war service also comes up in this and in two of the other novels: Beer's and Lennon's. Though Ehrlich's novel concerns a specific and pitiable historic subject, in many respects it is similar to the others, so that all these authors could no doubt get together and find many common interests--perhaps they have. Another way to put this is that the novels are churned out mostly to satisfy the Eastern reading public, almost as also was the case in the 19th Century. This includes Stegner, though his novel is more historical, he is definitely more of the older generation, ,his novel concerns mining a little more than ranching, and paints on a broader canvas that includes California, Colorado, Idaho, and Mexico as well as scenes back East and trans-continental train trips. You will find in the more modern Western authors an attention to more modern issues such as aggressive land development and environmental problems including deforestation and strip mining which make this part of the country an environmentalist's nightmare, as has also been pointed by Jared Diamond in his recent book "Collapse". All of the authors do pay some attention to regional history--notably Proulx in some of her stories and Ralph Beer in his novel.

Often writers of non-fiction who are particularly good at describing landscapes and worlds defined by geographic phenomena do not transfer to novel writing well. Gretel Ehrlich's moving descriptions of the American West are emotionally charged and lyric, but do not contain story in the same form as in novels. The depth of character development and tumultuous narrative in her novel surprised me. Ehrlich was able to convey the same sacred beauty of the western landscape she writes about in her non-fiction, and she complemented it with a love story equally depicted and equally harsh as the environment and times in which it was set.

Ms Erlich has written an excellent perspective of the tragic relocation of the Nisei Japanese during WWII. She carefully and artistically describes the impact on these loyal Americans and the their impact on the community in Wyoming of which they were forced to become a part. She describes the feelings of the Rocky Mountain West rural community forced to recieve these "foreigners" and how they accepted and/or rejected these people moved simply because of their ethnicity and how the relationship between a young rancher and a japanese-american women grows and changes both people. An excellent read