I hate to sound like a broken record, but I heard about this book on TTBOOK and knew I had to pick it up soon. Spragg spent most of his childhood growing up on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming, and he chronicles the formative experiences of this unique opportunity in such loving and heartbreaking vignettes.

I wasn't expecting for it to take me back to my childhood like it did. For a few years at least, my parents indulged my obsession for horses by sending me to camps to take care of them and go on the occasional trail ride. I got caught in my own flood of memories for part of the reading, remembering the ranch-hand lingo and the feel of the change of pace when devoting so much time to animals. Spragg's tenderness comes through so vividly and compassionately, it's hard not to get overly romantic about life on the range.

However, perhaps realizing the danger of getting too schmaltzy (and indeed sometimes his words did become a bit too poetically sentimental), Spragg also made quite clear the extremely harsh realities of this kind of life and that of one in Wyoming. I may have appreciated this side a little more despite that (or because?) it brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion. Just as I was about to lose myself in planning an escape from a trivial corporate job for one so organic and fulfilling as working with animals, Spragg grounded me with his passages concerning the wind and cold, taking care of his dying mother, and having to kill his beloved horses (or learning how to swiftly kill an animal in general).

This book serves as a forgiving reminder that being away from the hustle and bustle of city life is in no way an escape, but also as a paean to a land and life the few of us have the opportunity or will power to endure. Recommended for the starry-eyed naturalist. ( )

This is an award winning book, but not for me. I found it to be a ponderous read and an overall downer. It consists of a series of mainly dark-themed essays. I read it only because it was recommended and loaned to me by a Wyoming resident. The setting for the book is Wyoming and that's the best thing it has going for it, in my humble opinion. ( )

I enjoyed the language of this book. It's reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's descriptions of the West in All the Pretty Horses. I found it lacking in story line and trajectory. Each chapter is a snapshot of the narrator's life, and while each was interesting, I had hoped they would come together into some kind of resolution by the end. I suspect that the lack of resolution was intentional but as a reader I found it dissatisfying. ( )

Mark Spragg is a wonderful writer. His sense of place in the modern west of his native Wyoming is impeccably rendered. The trouble is, because these essays were written and printed elsewhere as separate pieces, that "place" thing is done over and over - the flora, the fauna, the rocks, the rivers and creeks, the cold, the wind, etc - to DEATH in fact. This very redundancy in the book dropped it from a five- to a four-star rating. The coming-of-age aspect of the story, Spragg maturing from a small boy to a middle-aged man who sees his parents divorce and his his own marriage fall apart, then watches his mother die a slow and painful death from emphysema, is handled like a master. You wanna read what it's like to to grow up out on the high plains near the end of the 20th century? Then this is a good place to start. Mark Spragg writes, in many ways, like a poet. His love of language is clear. WHERE THE RIVERS CHANGE DIRECTION is a darn fine book. ( )

The absolute best memoir I've ever read. Mark is an amazing wordsmith. ( )