CLAIMING GROUND

Laura Bell went out west in 1977, leaving her family in Kentucky and gaining a life of hard work and solitude among the sheepherders in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming. It’s a hard existence, and Bell’s fittingly stark and amazingly appealing memoir of her transformation from an Easterner to a Westerner is ably narrated by Laurie Birmingham. Her reading is unhurried and her voice quite nuanced—not soft but not harsh or sharp. It’s the voice of one who recalls more than three decades of life—of gains and losses, laughter and heartache—a life that is shaped by the vast landscape of which these incidents are but a part. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2011]