Gone the Hard Road

<p>Count your blessings his mother told him Think of everything good in your life.<br /><br />Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir <i>From Our House</i> which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands <i>Gone the Hard Road </i>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. <i>Gone the Hard Road </i>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 <i>Gone the Hard Road</i> offers the counternarrative of a loving mother and the creative life she made possible in spite of the eventual cost to herself. <br /><br />A poignant honest and moving read <i>Gone the Hard Road</i> will stay with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world.</p>