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    The Jump-Off Creek: A Novel
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    The Jump-Off Creek: A Novel
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    The Jump-Off Creek: A Novel
    Ebook241 pages4 hours

    The Jump-Off Creek: A Novel

    By Molly Gloss

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A widowed homesteader is determined to make a life in the unforgiving mountains of late 19th century Oregon in this “powerful novel of struggle and loss” (Dallas morning News).

    Acclaimed author Molly Gloss drew on pioneer diaries and old family stories to write this modern Western classic of a solitary woman’s frontier life. In the 1890s, Lydia Sanderson leaves her old life behind and journey’s to Jump-Off Creek to make her way as a homesteader. Enduring the hardships and deprivations of Oregon’s high mountain country, Lydia finds both courage and community in her determination to survive.

    This “unsparing portrait of pioneer life, recounted simply and without romanticism” displays an “intimate understanding of the harsh physical conditions” of the Western frontier, as well as the methods and practices that made such conditions livable (Publishers Weekly).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 20, 2014
    ISBN9780547525365
    Unavailable
    The Jump-Off Creek: A Novel
    Author

    Molly Gloss

    MOLLY GLOSS is the best-selling author The Hearts of Horses, The Jump-Off Creek, winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Oregon Book Award,  The Dazzle of Day, winner of  the PEN Center West Fiction Prize, and Wild Life, winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award. 

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    Reviews for The Jump-Off Creek

    4/5

    94 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Short book that gives a glimpse into the hard life of the frontier homesteader. I would have liked to get more involved with the characters. They are very close-mouthed and don't speak their minds. It was still a worthwhile read, though.
    • 5/5
      This novel, about homesteading the Oregon wilderness in the late 19th century's Long Depression, succeeds in creating a convincing and poignant sense of the isolation experienced by its characters. Their vulnerability and the tenuous viability of their way of life invests the narrative with a riveting, real-world tension. The prose is honed and beautiful.
    • 4/5
      The Jump-Off Creek by Molly Gloss is about homesteading in Oregon in the late 1800s. A woman who has been widowed comes to this remote area, near the Umpqua Mountains to take up her claim. She purchased the deed to an abandoned site so she starts with some land cleared and a ramshackle cabin. Her nearest neighbours are a couple of single men who are raising cattle. This was a very hard life as just in order to survive, she must work all day at tending her goats, improving her cabin, planting and caring for a garden, and clearing the land. She also had to live with the loneliness, insecurity, and the dirt.The story is told plainly and without romanticizing any part of the life. The author used pioneer diaries, journals and the stories of her own relatives to portray an accurate picture of the hardship that was frontier life. Although there is a story about an on-going feud between a squatter and one of her neighbours, the author really concentrates on the actuality of pioneering with descriptions of branding cattle, milking goats and logging. These descriptions draw a portrait that is very effective at both giving us insight into the hardships but also a glimmer of the slow development of community.The Jump-Off Creek is an engrossing and moving read about pioneering, a subject I love to read about but am most appreciative that I don’t have to live it.
    • 4/5
      Mollie Gloss grew up in Oregon and often bases her novels on the experiences of her women ancestors, all women of the West.Widowed, and not particularly sorry for it, Lydia Sanderson heads across the country in 1895 with two mules, two goats and what she hopes is enough food to see her through. She has bought a deed for property in the Blue Mountains of Oregon and plans to homestead on her own. Upon finding her property, she learns it is in poor shape in every way. The first order of business is putting up a fence for her animals and repairing her one room house so that they all can survive the winter. Among the many tasks she had before her was cutting timber, shaving it to shingles and getting them up on the roof to dry it in.Although warry of the men living around her, she learns to trust Tim and Blue, long time friends who are her nearest neighbors. Former cowboys, they have their own ranch and are willing to share their experience and strong backs when she will let them. Thanks to Tim she makes the acquaintance of a young woman who lives a mile away and only then realizes how much she has missed the company of another woman. Using diaries, letters and other first documents, Gloss makes the hardships of the frontier and the courageous lives of the women who settled the West seem very real. Still. it's hard to take in the struggles they overcame and how determined they had to be just to survive.
    • 5/5
      It's all "between the lines," in the silences - I probably shouldn't be reading Molly Gloss. I'm a guy, after all. But maybe, at 64, some of the nastiness of being a guy has finally worn off. Because I love the way this woman writes. The Hearts of Horses hooked me, Wild Life wowed me, and now, this earlier absolute gem of a novel just blew me away. How does she do this thing where the essence of the story lies in what is not said? Lydia Sanderson, Tim Whiteaker, Blue Odell. None of them say very much of any real significance. All are stoic and uncomplaining of the "narrow circumstances" life has dealt them. In fact they are nearly inarticulate; yet all these feelings - of yearning and loneliness, of sorrow and regret, they are all somehow laid bare in the pauses. The descriptions, the gestures, the sidelong glances, the facial expressions - all become muted dialogue. Even the one character who seems unabashedly bad, the angry bigoted boy that is Harley Osgood, has an element of humanity in him that doesn't quite let you hate him. There are no simple black-and-white characters in Gloss's fiction. There are, instead, infinite shades of gray, and an attention to descriptive detail that makes you understand implicitly much of what is left unsaid. The years-long friendship between the two cowboys Whiteaker and Odell is perhaps one of the best portrayals of love between men that fiction has to offer. And I'm not talking about any "Brokeback Mountain" kinda stuff here either. These are just two men who have stuck together through thick and thin, mostly the latter, and a bond has formed that is stronger than most marriages. Enough said. This is simply a superb story. There oughta be a ten-star rating for books of this caliber. And by the way, what a wonderful film for thinking adults this could be. Thanks again, Molly. I'll be watching for the next book, so please, Write on!
    • 4/5
      A thoughtful and subtle story of a woman homesteading in Oregon in the 1890's. I loved the author's later book, Hearts of Horses and this early novel is in the author's style, low key and unsentimental. Dramatic events happen and a lot of hardship and suffering but because of the style of writing these are endured without drama by the characters. A look at the real west-gritty and difficult.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book, and it's by an Oregon author! This is the story of a woman homesteader, Lydia Sanderson, who is trying to create a home in Easter Oregon in the 1890's. She is a widow, escaping what seems to have been a loveless past, with no desire to remarry. Gloss appears to have done a lot of research, including with her own great-grandmothers, and the story feels very real. Life was hard work, with very little time for any luxury. (I ended up really appreciating my house, with heating and plumbing and a floor. )Gloss also shows the poverty of her characters inner lives. They all had hard childhoods, and grew up with a limited emotional range -- but still with a human need to connect. The two main characters, Lydia, and a nearby rancher, Tim Whiteaker, develop a relationship of sorts, and throughout the book struggle to discover what they mean to each other.This is a short book, and Gloss uses spare, carefully considered language to great effect. This simplicity reflects the homesteading reality and keeps the reader in Lydia's reality.
    • 4/5
      Spare prose and writerly style give this slight story of a pioneering woman homesteading alone in Oregon some real staying power.