Yankee Yorkshireman: Migration Lived and Imagined Book

I enjoyed "The Horizontal World"; the writing was poetic, sensual, and lush and it compelled me. The memoir is about Marquart's troubled relationship to the small, rural world of North Dakota where she grew up. She does a fantastic job of evoking the strangeness of the agricultural, North Dakota landscape -- and why that was so strange to her. That aspect of the book really interested me. And she says some really interesting things about home, land, and sexuality. But the memoir was also disjointed and I felt like it wasn't really about anything. Because of that, a lot of it struck me as self-indulgent. It wasn't clear why she was writing it, other than to tell the reader what it was like to grow up on a farm which doesn't seem like enough of a reason to write a memoir. Still, there were many things in this memoir that I admire.