With its desperate acts and dire consequences, Nell Peters's tale of a woman's life in northern Wisconsin is a remarkable story, full of the sense and sound and flavor of a time and place rarely visited in books.

This is a sequel to the author's Crunching Gravel: A Wisconsin Boyhood in the Thirties. This account covers from when Robert Peters leaves the farm and is drafted into the Army during World War II. It is in Paris where he hears Marlene Dietrich sing Lili Marlene.

Not since John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet has there been a more remarkable embodiment of an historic personality in poetic form than in this book.