Rating: 
Summary: Style as spare and beautiful as Montana
Review: Judy Blunt does not waste words in the same way she would not have wasted water when she grew up and lived on a ranch in Montana. Her descriptions of her youth and early marriage are harsh and sad but also beautiful. Press Review (NYTimes, NPR) seem to have focussed the oppressive nature of her marriage and the sexism inherant in ranching culture. That's certainly present, but this book is definitely not an expose. Go elsewhere if you are looking for gory details. But there is natural drama (the race through flooded roads to the hospital when her daughter is ill) and beauty (her description of the Missouri Breaks). Her story about her relationship with Ajax the bull manages to be tough and tender at the same time. I am a big fan of well-written (non-celebrity) memoirs, and this is one of the best I have read in a long time. I would put it up there with Oliver Sack's Uncle Tungsten of last year.
Rating: 
Summary: Quiet Revolution
Review: Judy Blunt stages a revolution when she packs up and leaves her
husband after 10 years taking her 3 children with her. The 3rd
generation of ranchers in remote, bleak Montana, this is the
story of growing up in what could be the 19th century. Although there were good times and love present, her childhood and young
adulthood were marked by hard labor, hard discipline and a future
mapped out for her...follow her mother and grandmother's footsteps. The fact that she was able to leave, educate herself and write this books is a testament to her determination and intelligence.
Well written, this is a fascinating story which can hardly be
imagined by most American women today. Certainly well worth
reading!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Unforgivable
Review: Judy Blunt was raised on an extremely poor ranch in an extremely remote area of Montana. Life was so rough pictures taken of the family look like the Depression, not the 60's when she grew up. She loved it but when she had children she made the very painful decision to leave her husband, her family, her way of life behind. The book described various, unconnected incidents from her childhood. They were interesting but not compelling. The writing was only okay, not particularly poetic or evocative. I thought the book was going to explain how and why she decided to leave. In fact, she doesn't talk about the divorce at all. Given this was supposed to be the whole point of the book ("Breaking Clean") I found this omission unforgivable.
Rating:
Summary: A Look Inside
Review: Judy Blunt's highly acclaimed memoir was a learning experience for me -- about a woman's grim and overworked life on a ranch and what it means to be a part of a "corporate ranch". Blunt writes knowledgeably about how ranch wives are expected to be submissive and about the incredibly grueling workload that they carry, day in and day out. Yet the author never whines about it or asks the reader to feel sorry for her....she just presents these as facts of life. I found myself anxiously awaiting the winters because, although bitter and harsh, they gave the women somewhat of a respite from their duties. While Blunt writes beautifully descriptive prose, sometimes she lost this reader in too much detail. One part I am thinking of was the fire, another the big blizzard, plus some of the events that took place in the school. She just went on and on about these episodes for too long. The wordiness just kind of beat me down. Some of her most wonderful descriptions were of the calf she delivered and of her vegetable garden and root cellar. I did feel a bit cheated. Blunt writes of her childhood and teen years for well over half of the book, then seems to hurry through the years as a ranch wife (she was 18, he was 30 when they married after being engaged for over two years). The book abruptly ends after about six years of marriage. In the forward, she has stated that she left after being married for 12 years. I felt that those missing six years at the end of her marriage should have been included in the book. All in all, though, this was an amazing look inside a life that many readers know nothing about.
Rating:
Summary: Ranch wife tells all
Review: Judy Blunt's memoir of life on Montana ranches is a far cry from Willa Cather's portrayals of frontier Nebraska, but there is something of the same spirit in both writers, each strong-willed, independent-minded, and talented in a world dominated by men. Each maintains a love of the open prairie, but while Alexandra Bergson in "O Pioneers!" is able to hold her own and thrive on the land, Blunt is hemmed in and frustrated at each turn, a ranchwife-in-training through girlhood and finally a ranchwife with children of her own. Physically strong and fearless as any man, she uses hard labor as a way to cope with a life-long belief in the fundamental unfairness of being denied opportunities simply because of her gender. In her thirties, she finally leaves the ranch and starts a new life in Missoula as a divorced mother, university student, and writer. However, her book is not about the break-up of her marriage or her final decision to leave behind the life she'd been living. It is a carefully remembered recounting of her childhood, youth, and early years as a rancher's wife. It's an often turbulent story, where every passage from one stage of life to the next is marked by resistance, dismay, and a sense of deep loss. The people in the circle of her family are captured in fiercely observed detail -- especially her mother and father, her sister Gail, her husband John, and John's parents. The physical world they inhabit is vividly rendered -- the character of the arid, prairie land, the seasonal changes, the extremes of weather, the isolation, and the difficulty of making a living out here against the odds. She also captures the constraints of the social world they inhabit, and she articulates clearly the limited possibilities for personal growth and independence where gender roles and social norms are rigidly observed. She provides a realistic portrayal of ranch work for men, women, and their children as long days (and nights during calving season) of routine physical labor, and she describes the neverending work of cooking, gardening, child-rearing, putting up food for the winter, trips to town for supplies, doing ranch chores, and pitching in when the men need an extra hand. Meanwhile, the chapters in her book center around the breaks in the routine -- the unexpected events that become the material for "stories," the makings of family lore, local legend, or gossip (as when her newly-wed husband John is observed welding together the broken frame of their old bed). Among the breaks in the routine, there is an Indian boy who is a student for a short while in her all-white one-room school, the winter of 1964 which maroons her family during a severe blizzard that wipes out much of their cattle herd, a prairie fire fought by the whole community, an older boy in high school who attempts unsuccessfully to have sex with her, a harrowing 50-mile trip to the nearest hospital as her daughter is burning up with a high fever. Blunt also describes well the cultural clash that occurs when kids born and raised in the country find themselves navigating the town-oriented world of high school, with its very different adolescent mores and values. Blunt is a fine writer and is able to wring suspense and pathos from her material. Starting as she does with the break-up of her marriage and then backtracking to tell her story from the beginning, she makes of the book a real page-turner. While the book might well appear on a list of feminist literature, such a label is too limiting. The story she has too tell is much broader; it is at home with books about rites of passage and coming of age, the West, rural living, ranching, and nature writing. As a companion to this book, I'd also recommend Linda Hasselstrom's "Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains" and Wallace Stegner's "Wolf Willow," which describes his boyhood on a homestead along the Montana-Saskatchewan border, 50 years earlier and about 100 miles northwest of Blunt's country.
Rating:
Summary: Poignant and Truthful
Review: Judy Blunt's poignant and truthful description of the struggles with being a strong-willed, capable, and feminine woman in the midst of a time and place that only valued the masculine showed me the devastating consequences of this narrow definition on humanity, male and female. Blunt portrays her father and husband with forgiveness though they are unable to comprehend her desire to be considered a full partner in the life of the ranch. Rather than faulting the men she loves, Blunt holds the male-dominated tradition accountable. For me this book was a journey into the life of people who love each other deeply, yet are torn apart by a repressive, unchanging culture. Blunt portrays Eastern Montana in exact and vivid prose as if the land itself were God, making the need for people to use all of their resources more important and the lack of understanding of women's full value more tragic.
Rating:
Summary: Loved it!
Review: Ms. Blunt - you put into words so beautifully what I experienced as a farm child in the 40's & 50's in the prairies of South Dakota: the blizzards, the roads that turned to gumbo when it rained, the farm animals that became pets - many times after they had been harmed by farm machinery; and always the intensity of trying to survive on the land. Your writing brought back so many memories -- and I thought I was the only one who had those experiences!!! What wonderful descriptions you crafted with your words. Thank you.
Rating:
Summary: Breaking Clean Review by Judy Blunt
Review: The book Breaking Clean is about the author and her life growning up in a small town of Malta, Montana. She describes her life growing up on farm from a little child in to a grown woman. She tells about how her family wants whats best for her and whats her to keep the family tradition alive by marrying the neigbors son who is 12 years older than her. But she wants more than to be living on a farm for the rest of her life. I thought this book was really good because i can make lots of connections to it from where i am from. But over all it is a good book.
Rating:
Summary: Breaking Clean?
Review: This is a beautifully written book, full of rich and colorful detail of a life unimaginable to the urban majority of us. Judy has a gift for allowing us to visualize right along with her the minutiae of ranch life, from delivering calves to racing her sick daughter to the hospital. It is a curious life, because they are not as isolated as their ancestors, yet have to work just as hard and face all the same dangers.
Judy is "bluntly" honest with us about her totally frustrated reaction to being a woman in a man's world: smarter, harder-working, more aware of the interconnectedness of the details, yet not allowed to speak her piece.
It definitely is a book worth reading, yet I found it curiously unbalanced. She has allowed us to be voyeurs for her girlhood years on the ranch and high school years in town. Then, just when she has us most anticipating a frank discussion of her marriage, divorce, and the new life she has created for herself and her children, she doesn't allow us inside the house.
She also doesn't share her vision of her future. I found myself wondering if she had used the term 'Clean Break" with irony for the title, because it is obvious she will never really break with her formative past. I hope she will write a sequel and remedy these lacks.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: This is one of the best books I've read in 10 years. It falls into the "couldn't put it down" category. It made me laugh out loud in parts and touched me to tears in others. It is very "real", but so is life.
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