Set amid the cornfields of central Nebraska, The Beautiful Plain opens on a hot afternoon in a hay barn, where three adolescents push a cardboard box filled with a girl to the edge of the loft. What begins as a prank will reverberate for decades, especially for Laura, who learns that afternoon just how far she will travel for acceptance.
Rejected by her former husband and with her precocious child in tow, Laura returns to her hometown of Platte, Nebraska, to see if she can recover what was sent to the ground that summer afternoon long ago. Immersed in the unassuming beauty of the Great Plains and following a single year of one woman's life, The Beautiful Plain invites the reader to reconsider where beauty and grace reside.
About the Author :
Jennifer Sinor is the author of several books, including The Yogic Writer: Uniting Breath, Body, and Page; Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World (Nebraska, 2020); Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe; and Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays and The Norton Reader. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University, where she is a professor of English.
Review :
"A study in guilt, grief, and reawakening, The Beautiful Plain examines the bifurcation that comes from the suppression of our shadow selves. Through fragmented recollections--ancestral diaries, personal memories, and traumatic stories of war--Jennifer Sinor interrogates what it means to know and not know, to see and not see, to blindly box ourselves in while the wild world goes on without us, as well as the courage and community it takes to turn and face the refining fire of our own agency."--Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
"Jennifer Sinor's big-hearted novel The Beautiful Plain movingly portrays a life haunted by guilt over an act of childhood cruelty, and the power of love to redeem the past."--Ladette Randolph, author of Private Way, Haven's Wake, and A Sandhills Ballad
