"Count your blessings," his mother told him, "Think of everything good in your life."Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir,
From Our House
, which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands,
Gone the Hard Road
is the story of Beulah Martin's endurance and sacrifice as a mother, and the gift of imagination she offered her son. Martin unfolds the world she created for him within their unsettled family life, from the first time she read to him in a doctor's office waiting room, to enrolling him in a children's book club, to the books she bought him in high school.
portrays Beulah's selflessness as the family moved around the Midwest, sometimes in the face of her husband's opposition, to show her son a different way of being. Rather than concentrate on the life his father threatened to destroy, as Martin's previous memoirs do,
offers the counternarrative of a loving mother and the creative life she made possible, in spite of the eventual cost to herself. A poignant, honest, and moving read,
will stay with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world.