Beautiful on so many levels!!!!!!!!!!!!!

books:


	• Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land Amy Irvine North Point Press, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Amy weaves like the Basketmakers

Amy Irvine tells multiple stories in "Trespass" and weaves them with the skill of the Basketmaker Anasazi whose culture she explores. I am much her elder but what she shares of her life resonates inside me with my own hardfought truths, my mixed bag of insights, and my own convoluted spiritual growth. This is a multifaceted gem. It can't be explained. It has to be experienced by the individual through reading.

Beautiful on so many levels!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am torn between rushing through this book and slowly savoring every page. I have so many passages marked to read over and try to remember, because they are so meaningful to me. The way she discribes the conflict between the need to belong and the need to be true to one's self is just one of the many things that rang so true for me. In such a sensitive and thoughtful way Ms. Irvine has described issues of gender, conservation, love, preservation, family, and landscape and I am truly grateful for her expression and interpretation.

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Unknown American History

This book is right up there wtih Sides' Blood and Thunder for Western American History writing at its best. Only this is better, because it is told from the point of view of one of America's little known minorities: Mormon women. Amy brings heart and soul of the old West and the new together in a wonderful story in her wonderful style. I loved it.

Susan T.

Critique of My Hometown

Amy Irvine is a gifted writer whose prose kept me reading in spite of feeling offended several times in nearly every chapter about a variety of subjects including the LDS Church, the little town of Monticello I grew up in, cattle ranching and the seemingly inflexible wilderness attitudes. My younger brother enjoys riding what he calls a four wheeler and she calls an ORV to see the incredible sights of the Colorado Plateau she so beautiful describes in her book. It is clear that she and I share a love of the redrock country. As a retired psychiatrist I enjoyed her fearless and at times appropriately veiled exposé of her personal and family dynamics. I thoroughly enjoyed the interweaving of her knowledge of ancient San Juan County cultures into the fabric of her personal story. The ending chapters were unsettling to me and I am not sure I can explain why. Is it because it seems she has given up her passionate quest? Is it because her trespass metaphor became blurred? Is it because she became ill? I don't know. I will let it continue to percolate in my mind and I may read it again. I recommend it. I agree with Terry Tempest Williams, "This is a transformative memoir that dances between shadow and light.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Trespass is the story of one woman?s struggle to gain footing in inhospitable territory. A wilderness activist and apostate Mormon, Amy Irvine sought respite in the desert outback of southern Utah?s red-rock country after her father?s suicide, only to find out just how much of an interloper she was among her own people. But more than simply an exploration of personal loss, Trespass is an elegy for a dying world, for the ruin of one of our most beloved and unique desert landscapes and for our vanishing connection to it. Fearing what her father?s fate might somehow portend for her, Irvine retreated into the remote recesses of the Colorado Plateau?home not only to the world?s most renowned national parks but also to a rugged brand of cowboy Mormonism that stands in defiant contrast to the world at large. Her story is one of ruin and restoration, of learning to live among people who fear the wilderness the way they fear the devil and how that fear fuels an antagonism toward environmental concerns that pervades the region. At the same time, Irvine mourns her own loss of wildness and disconnection from spirituality, while ultimately discovering that the provinces of nature and faith are not as distinct as she once might have believed.

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