Erika Bolstad is a freelance journalist, when her mother passes away, she discovers her mum owns a share of the mineral rights to Erika’s great-grandmothers land. With very little information to go by, Erika starts investigating the lives of her great-grandmother Anna and her great-great-grandmother Martha Sletviod. Erika travels across Nebraska with her husband Chris, through the Badlands of North and South Dakota, trying to find clues, landmarks and the scattered graves of her ancestors. What she uncovers is a sad tale of what homesteaders had to deal with, grasshopper plagues, drought, flood, blizzards, fires, and isolation. Her great-grandmother Anna married Andrew Haraseth on the 13th of December 1905. Anna already owned 160 acres of land in North Dakota, within a year she and her husband built a small house and barn and had their son Ed. When Ed was only a few months old, Anna was taken to an asylum, she was likely suffering from the after effects of a difficult birth and post-natal depression. Her only child Ed inherited her land, the family still owns a share of the mineral rights, and does this mean if the company strikes oil they will be rich? Erika looks into Dakotas oil boom and it’s many revolutions, what she discovers is, it’s a male dominated workforce and a political one as well. Everything centers around finding and producing oil, populations of towns, and the building of roads and schools and do they consider the long term effects it has on the environment and do they even care about climate change? Interesting reading about the Homestead Act, life in North Dakota and how many Americas are descendants of the original homesteaders. A sad story of how a woman lost her rights, over her own body, land, son and most of all her freedom. Three and a half stars from me, the memoir was a little slow in places and Ms. Bolstad focuses too much on her own life at times and not enough on Anna.

This was an extremely disappointing one for me. The description is not at all what the book presents. I’m sure the author has researched thoroughly but I didn’t pick this to learn about environmental issues, oil prices, and politics. And although I relate to the infertility issues-I found it a strange topic to insert into the book. The author rarely touched on Anna for the first 50-60 pages I read. The rest of the writing is all over the place and dry, as if the author is trying to fit too much into one book. If she focused on one topic it would’ve been more enjoyable. So sadly I had to DNF. What I thought was an interesting search for her family’s past, just seemed to be a stream of consciousness on too many topics