All but the waltz : a memoir of five generations in the life of a Montana family

In language reminiscent of the wild beauty of Big Sky Country, Mary Clearman Blew gives us a glimpse into the lives of her family as she traces their connection to Montana's natural and human landscape. Beginning with her great-grandparents' arrival in 1882 in Montana—still a territory then—Blew relates the stories that make up her life.

As Ms. Blew pieces together her family's hundred-year history in central Montana, she writes with sadness, fierce pride, and an unforgettable clarity of their struggle to survive drought, disaster, and economic depression. . . . [I]n prose with a shining edge, she etches short, stunning vignettes of this bleak yet beautiful country.—The New York Times Book Review

Subtle prose that transports to a magical place, dissolving the line between memory and the present. A superbly realized vision.—Kirkus

Recurring, concatenated characters, places, and themes give these essays a novelistic unity. The collection thereby becomes simultaneously an autobiography within a family context, a family biography from the perspective of one of its members, and a chronicle of the West.—Booklist

In these essays, family members' hopes and sorrows interweave. They all learned that the beautiful land is demanding. Blew's clear vision allows us, too, to glean this rich heritage.—Seattle Times

All But the Waltz is true and heartening and beautiful, as fine in its way as Wolf Willow or Old Jules.—William Kittredge

All But the Waltz is a clean, haunting portrait of a sometimes remarkable, sometimes ordinary family on the great plains of Montana. What is astonishing is how we come to know and care about them, each blessed one of them in the pages of this book. Mary Clearman Blew, in her powerful, moving language, in her deep dignified sensibility, has given us a treasure we will long hold close.—James Welch, author of The Indian Lawyer

Publishers Weekly

These powerful portraits span five generations of Blew's family's struggles to survive on the desolate ranchlands of central Montana, beginning in 1882. A bleaker view of home on the range is hard to imagine. Most of the men seem hopeless romantics, tragically flawed, while the women, who appear trapped in a he-man world, persevere--often heroically. To fiction writer Blew ( Runaway ) women like her schoolteacher grandmother and ranch-wife mother are the family pillars; her father and grandfather remain perplexing, despite her efforts to understand them. Blew concludes with a stirring description of her own ambivalent connection to this rugged part of the world. (Sept.)

In language reminiscent of the wild beauty of Big Sky Country, the author gives readers a glimpse into the lives of her family as she traces their connection to Montana's natural and human landscape. Beginning with her great-grandparents' arrival in 1882 in Montana--still a territory then--Blew relates the stories that make up her life. Illustrations In the sagebrush to the north of the mountains in central Montana, where the Judith River deepens its channel and threads a slow, treacherous current between the cutbanks, a cottonwood log house still stands.