Rating: 
Summary: Non-fiction Just Got Tougher
Review: "Breaking Clean" combines Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen's wry disillusioned misery caused by oncoming womanhood with an active, tough voice that is Blunt's alone. In fact, the conflicts, silence, and grueling work described by Blunt would have finished off "city women" like Plath and Kaysen.
The descriptions of physical work as a way of life, whether working cattle or raising children, truly stand out here, for they seem intended to shock you with the hardship of the American farmer's life, yet Blunt does not ask for pity. She shows the Montana rancher as someone simply doing what has to be done-- even if love or personal worth must be ignored to make it happen.
Read this book and let Blunt show to you her wonder and dread at the fact that what has nourished her has also nearly ruined her. Her choice in the end is difficult, but we feel as strongly as she does that it is the only one.
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Summary: A great look at life on the Montana prairie
Review: A Review of Breaking Clean
Often over the past couple decades, I have marveled at a country that can hold within its boundaries some of the greatest metropolitan areas and some of the most isolated rural communities that exist on the earth. Growing up in rural Montana, I had no concept of this isolation. Somehow I just thought that that was the way things were. And there may be more isolated areas in this country than the Northern Montana Hi-Line that Judy Blunt writes about in Breaking Clean, but I don?t think people live there.
There are several good reasons to read her book, including the fact that it is well written and has won accolades from a couple of the University of Montana?s literary big guns, William Kittredge and James Welch. This alone is no small task.When you finish reading Blunt?s story of her years in Northern Montana, there is no way you can fault her for her honesty. What she writes of was the way it was and is the way it is. Though technology has changed much in the last fifteen years or so, with satellite dishes, more and more ranch families moving to town, and the Internet in places you can?t drive to three months out of the year, you can still see the places, the roads, and the people she describes if you take the hundred-and-fifty mile scenic tour of South Phillips County. When Blunt writes about four-wheel-drive pickups plowing down gumbo roads, you can feel the mud sticking to your tires. And when she writes of the cohesiveness of the rural community in Phillips County, the ranchers driving out to the country road to see their neighbor safely on his way during an emergency trip to the hospital in Malta, you get a feel for the tradition that maintains that one of life?s greatest responsibility is to help your neighbor in the time of need.
In writing her book Breaking Clean, Blunt preserves a sense of the oral tradition. In all families there is a sense of the family story, the story that makes one family different from another, the story told around the supper table, at family gatherings, at children?s bed time. This sense of story is even more apparent in the kind of isolation Blunt describes, where the family history becomes the way children learn to relate to the world, because it is the only history they know first hand. And it is through the pathos in this story that she learns such truths as the patriarchal order. ?Memories of my grandfather?s death were tied to another small death, the day I discovered that as a girl, I would never own my childhood ranch.?
Much of Blunt?s story deals with time. Time doesn?t exist in the middle of the open prairie the same way it exists in the city, and those who live on the prairie must deal more intimately with the natural order of the seasons. The year is segmented into sections such as haying, calving, feeding, and the like. When Blunt writes of the calendar she peruses in the abandoned Andrews homestead, time is measured in eggs, temperature, and gallons of milk, painting as clear a picture of life on the prairie as any carefully written journal.
And Blunt doesn?t leave out a touch of humor, the kind of humor one often finds in the cowboy poetry and western memoirs of the legion of western writers who have gone before her. Her description of the visit to a church in Hayes with her sister and a schoolteacher is especially representative. ?He dipped his finger into a container of water and turned to us. He drew a small cross over my sister?s head, then touched her forehead with his wet thumb. He dipped again for me. We stood quietly until he was done, reading his face for signs that we could move on again. By then he could have dragged a live chicken from his vest and bitten its head off and neither of us would have flinched.?
Understandably, some might be concerned about the publishings of a local writer, for neither writers nor prophets are dealt with kindly in their own country. However, they need not fear. Blunt?s book is not about revealing secrets or settling old scores. Her autobiographical sketches paint an honest, graphic picture of rural Montana life, dealing with the good, the bad, the victories and the defeats of growing up on the plains and building a sense of personal worth. In the settling of the west, many families and many individuals broke with the past to make a new life for themselves, and that is exactly what Blunt writes of in her narrative.
However, in her book, Breaking Clean, Blunt has written more than the story of her own survival. She has written a piece of the story of the survival of all the families who settled this state, lived through its blizzards, sweated in its summer heat, and carved their own names in the windblown dirt of the Montana prairie.
Rating:
Summary: A view of the Hi-Line from Illinois
Review: A spellbinding story. Not since reading Tolkein in the early 70's have I been so absorbed in a piece of literature, or was it reality? Having grown up in Malta, I can attest that the descriptions of places and attitudes are a spot on match from my perspective. Judy's candor or should I say "version of fiction" is very refreshing.I now live in Illinois and am always intrigued when people first learn that I am from Montana and they ask me why anyone would want to move away from "God's Country". I now have evidence. Cinderella is a great story if your Cinderella. If you are one of the mice or the pumpkin, it kinda leaves you with no place to grow. Judy has literally written her way out of this fairytale drafted by others and into her own reality.
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Summary: A woman made of granite
Review: After finishing this it was difficult to determine which I admired more, the author or the memoir she produced. This is a spare, beautifully crafted book that is totally engrossing, and evocatively depicts the patrilineal culture, and suppression of women (and their typical acquiescence) in traditional subsistence ranch culture. Based upon the reviews, I anticipated a work detailing her escape from an oppressive relationship. Instead, she focuses on depicting the struggle to fulfill her own identity in light of the culture and circumstances from which she emerged. I was impressed by the compassion and restraint Blunt exercised in succinctly why she ended her marriage to permit pursuit of her own individuality. The memoir is touching as it balances nostalgia with a brutally honest description of the grueling conditions of her life in Eastern Montana. This is a very fine work; I am throughly impressed and recommend it highly.
Rating: 
Summary: A near miss
Review: Although I will freely admit that this book held my interest, I must admit to an unsettling feeling at the finish. Why the title? Is she gloating about leaving the life she was raised in and claims to cherish? What happened to her parents, her husband, her friends? The disjointed ending leaves a reader full of questions. I cannot help but wonder how the people of Malta feel about Blunt's analysis of her existence. Although her life as a ranch wife must have been difficult, her husband loved and protected her. The writing style is compelling, the storyline is riveting,but the ending is evasive. Is the author happy now in Missoula? I both like and dislike the book. To me, Blunt seems to be an oxymoron: she pays tribute to her heritage, yet she works feverishly to destroy it. I hope she writes a sequel that provides answers. She is a gifted writer, but the ending of this book does not provide any kind of satisfaction for a reader--- most especially a Montana reader who is familiar with the life of which she writes.
Rating: 
Summary: Offensive, and not at all typical of life in Montana
Review: Although I'm genuinely sorry that Ms Blunt had such an awful experience, I can personally attest to the fact that this is by no means the Montana I grew up in, or the ranchers I know. On our Montana ranch, men and women both work inside and outside. It's an equal partnership, far more than I found in the few years I lived off the ranch. To portray ALL ranch life as abusive and unequal is highly offensive to this native Montana rancher's daughter. For another, more equal, view of Montana ranch life, I suggest "Growing up in Paradise," by Helen and Edwin Nelson with Arch Wagner. The Nelsons are a longtime well-respected ranching family in Montana.
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Summary: an articulate voice from the Mountain West
Review: American readers, especially those on both coasts, will laud Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean," a gracefully written account of her Montana life. It may seem startling to read of her early childhood in the l950s without indoor plumbing or electricity. She writes lyrically of the beauties, and plainly of the hardships, of Montana spring days and winter nights. The people adapt by becoming extremely practical, and pride themselves on their toughness. Despite the long distances between ranch houses, community bonding is strong. One of the most moving passages in her book is the story of taking her toddler daughter, who is suffering a high fever and convulsions, on the long, muddy and uncertain journey to the nearest hospital. Along the way, neighbors drive out their ranch roads to the main road, blinking their headlights as a sign of solidarity, good wishes, and support.
Judy, although a good and uncomplaining worker, seems unfit for ranch life, as she is imaginative to the point of being eccentric. (Or, maybe not: As a longtime resident of the intermountain west, I know there is room here for all kinds of people.) A couple of episodes in the book involve self-mutilation, and are meant to convey her anger over being denied full ranch-citizenship because she is female. But to this
reviewer, these self-dramatizing descriptions ring rather false. Her parents' love and time must be devoted to unremitting ranch chores, and there is little left over for five children, or so Judy felt. She doesn't get the attention she would like, although her parents respond strongly to her adolescent behavior. At eighteen, she is perceived by parents and community as old enough to become a ranch wife. It was my judgment from reading of her attitude and actions that she was a very young 18, inwardly immature even if outwardly competent. She struggles with her role as a ranch wife, unable to own anything in her own name although expected to pull her share. She knows that in reality women pull more than their share, expected to help when necessary with seasonal ranch chores, while men are not expected to help with the household chores at any time. She ponders the rising tide of 70s women's liberation, aware of her grandmothers' generation who struggled for gentility, hiding their work-coarsened hands in white gloves, drinking tea and addressing each other formally, in their own mode of "consciousness-raising." Wise in ways that urban sophisticates are not, she sees ironies and shades of grey. There are many wonderful memoirs of American life on the Lower East Side, in Los Angeles, in the pre- and post-bellum South, and in the midwestern heartland. There are few voices from the much-romanticized, little known Mountain West. Judy Blunt has made a major contribution from this area. Kudoes!
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Summary: Willa Cather updated
Review: An amazing book. A memoir of life on a ranch in Montana with wonderful writing, about nature and animals and the finest writing about horses I've ever read. In spite of much that sounds idyllic the author was a victim of sexism, child abuse, daughter-in-law abuse and relentless overwork. These people behaved as if they were living in a time warp. She was born in 1954 but much of the life she describes is straight out of Wlla Cather (the Song of the Lark was 1915). She eventually brings it up-to-date, including a few things that have changed for the worse.
If this is country living in the boonies, I shall be less inclined to grumble as I see my once rural residence engulfed by suburbia.
Rating: 
Summary: An Honest Appraisal of Women's Role in Modern Society
Review: Blunt writes from her own experience while discussing larger issues important to all women and interested men. Mostly it describes her life as a teenager and young mother living on the vast plains of Eastern Montana. But she contrasts her experience with women's expectations of an equitable life and finds her experience comes up short. She and her friends are tough, skilled, capable women who master many ranch skills. Yet they are expected to do that work AND all the domestic work AND keep primary responsibility for raising the children. An excellent real-world test of feminist ideas and an interesting, well-written book.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring!!!
Review: Boring, and written in an unpleasantly uneven style. There are a few good observations about women's life in farming communities, but it's not worth reading the whole book just for those few good pages.
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