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After her life as she knows it is ended by heartbreak, Mary Rasmussen, a strong-willed and independent young ranch woman living in the Sandhills of western Nebraska, suddenly feels that all she has believed in—God, her instincts, the land itself—has failed her, and she abandons her cultural and emotional ties, succumbing to circumstances she thinks she is powerless to control. In a rash decision, she marries a conservative, patriarchal preacher who doesn’t understand Mary, the ranching community, or anything beyond his own beliefs.

This is good, old-fashioned storytelling at its best, and Mary Rasmussen will live forever in your hearts as a young woman who faces enormous tests and survives in order to protect those she loves. Stubborn, determined, and loyal, Mary makes a life that requires both imagination and grit and you end up rooting for her every inch of the way.

Randolph is revisioning the American plains in this novel, telling the stories of the women who struggle side-by-side with men on their Sandhills ranches and in their small towns. These are people of great courage and even greater integrity, who love and lose and love again, as undaunted as their pioneer forebears in their efforts to make a life for themselves and future generations…

Winner of the 2010 Nebraska Book Award for fiction

Finalist for 2010 Women Writing the West's WILLA Award

Selected as Editor's Choice Book in The New York Times in 2009

Finalist for 2009 ForeWord Book of the Year Award

“ . . . [a] quietly moving first novel.”

—New York Times Book Review

“A Sandhills Ballad is a poignantly written, lovely novel of the heartland that honors the best traditions of storytelling.”

—Jim Harrison, The English Major, Legends of the Fall

“I began reading A Sandhills Ballad in the afternoon and found myself, at three in the morning, finishing the last page. Mary's story is at once sad and brave, tender and compelling. Ladette Randolph knows well the rhythms and variations of life in Nebraska's Sandhills, where men and women face loss without complaint and celebrate their days with a love of family and land and community that runs like a quiet stream beneath the seamless prose of this novel.”

—Mary Clearman Blew, Jackalope Dreams

“It strikes me that A Sandhills Ballad is a nearly perfect book. The harsh Nebraska landscape is a complete character in its own right. Unforgiving. Somewhat distant. Aloof. Home. The human characters are more yielding, but only just. And the sum of what author Ladette Randolph creates here is unforgettable. We meet Mary Rasmussen as she's awakening from a six week coma after an accident in which she has lost her husband. "In that deep sleep she dreamt about the wind. She heard it whistle under the windowsills and through the cracks of an empty house, heard it rattle the loose No Hunting sign on a weathered post, and slam open and shut again the sagging door of an old barn." A husband is not all Mary lost in the accident and, over the fullness of A Sandhills Ballad, her emotional awakening is like a rebirth. The most startling thing about A Sandhills Ballad is the fact that Randolph does not have a wider following. A winner of the Nebraska Book Award (for the collection This is Not the Tropics), she is also the recipient of a Norcroft fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and a Virginia Faulkner Award. With the publication of this exquisite novel, perhaps her name will become better known.”

—Monica Stark, January Magazine

“Randolph . . . brings the Sandhills of western Nebraska vividly to life, as experience by one plucky young woman. Recently married Mary Needham loses a leg in the tragic auto accident that kills her husband. She had been like one of the ranch hands as a girl, and then on her in-law's ranch, but now she is lost. Convinced she has nowhere else to run, she makes a hasty and regrettable decision to marry Ward Hamilton, the conservative preacher who comes calling. She soon realizes her role is merely that of "the church's servant." She nearly leaves, but . . . she stays . . . while Ward becomes more and more obsessed with his church, seeing his life as a battle between good and evil, Randolph's debut novel becomes a page-turner as the reader pulls for Mary to regain her self-esteem and ultimately return to the land she loves.”

—Deborah Donovan, BOOKLIST

“After youthful rancher Mary Needham loses her husband and her left leg in a terrible car crash, she's convinced that God has abandoned her and that no one will love her again. Her fear of being alone pushes her to marry charismatic but conservative preacher Ward Hamilton, but by the time she realizes her horrible mistake she's pregnant and unable to leave him. When Ward spearheads a lawsuit against the family of Mary's dead husband, she risks everything she has built to get away from him. Stark and engrossing, this debut novel from short story writer, editor and Ploughshares director Randolph (This Is Not the Tropics) fixes an empathetic but relentless gaze on a woman determined to expunge the regrets from her life. The small-town American plains setting is strangely void of temporal context, trapped much like its heroine, whose trepidation and hesitancy Randolph handles with unexpected skill, keeping Mary likable when she could easily have grown frustrating. An immersing achievement, this novel should please any fan of good fiction, not just the horses-and-heartthrobs set.”

—Publisher's Weekly

“With penetrating insight and solid authority on the rural West, Ladette Randolph has carved out a compelling saga of a young woman ripening into maturity. You cannot help but cheer for Mary Rasmussen. Randolph's work is tough, tender, and brave, a pitch-perfect take on the hard beauty of life on the Nebraska prairie.”

—Pam Joern, The Floor of the Sky, The Plain Sense of Things

“Randolph writes truthfully of the Nebraska Sandhills, a harsh land that exacts a brutal price for those who choose to love it. Having lived there, one never truly leaves, as Mary Rasmussen discovers, it etches its beautiful scar on body and soul.”

—Jonis Agee, The River Wife

“We never think we're good enough. Often, we think we deserve the bad that happens to us. It's a kind of sickness, this self-hatred, and it can swamp a life. In this bleak, familiar novel, Ladette Randolph paints a picture of two decades of a life dedicated to penance. Mary Rasmussen was driving the car that got hit by the truck that killed her young husband and forced doctors to amputate her leg. "She instantly saw herself as she always had in relation to the vastness of the sky: small vulnerable, fragile,momentary, free of scrutiny, silent. she was here now and someday she would be gone. Her disability and her new status as widow were not the beginning of feelings of inconsequence. There was a grim comfort in being reminded of what she had always believed was her true place in the scheme of things." In the kind, good family of Nebraska ranchers she comes from, there is very little talking done. Mary, subconsciously, devises her own punishment: marry the horrible self-satisfied preacher with the short teeth and fastidious morals, a man who will surely make her life and the lives of their four children a living hell. He forces them to live in the ramshackle parsonage, insisting that their comfort is of no importance. He denies her every possible pleasure and is the embodiment of the terrifying ability one human can have to ruin another person's life in a thousand small ways. Randolph has worked hard to get the Sandhills language right; she clearly has enormous respect for the ranching culture. This creates a kind of density of detail in the novel, sometimes at the expense of transitions (for example, the births of their four children, which happens in a few pages). but this is not grave--Mary's focus on detail is, after all, one of the things that keeps her alive. Born with the gift of premonition, she must learn, in spite of the preacher who tries to substitute faith for kindness, how to trust her own intuition.” 

—Susan Reynolds, Los Angeles Times