by Sarah Smarsh
Read by the author
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Content: There is talk of sexual assault and swearing, including a few f-bombs. It’s in the Kansas section (I think? It’s kind of everywhere right now.) of the bookstore.

This book is a series of essays Smarsh wrote for other publications, spanning from 2013-2024. They hit upon all her usual subjects: class divide, political issues (especially ones here in Kansas – both Brownback and the 2017 special election in Wichita made an appearance), and the rural-urban divide all made an appearance.

And that, in the end, was my problem with the book. At the beginning, I thought it was smart and relevant and interesting… but as the essays went on, I realized that Smarsh really only has one thing to say: rural people are not a monolith and they deserve respect and political attention. Which is a good thing, to be sure. But, a whole book where each new essay is a re-hashing of something she said in the previous essay gets tedious. On the one hand, I’d rather people be reading this than Hillbilly Elegy; on the other hand, I’d rather they be reading Poverty by America than this. And honestly, if you want to read a Smarsh book, read Heartland.

I did bail on this one after about listening to 3/4 of it. Smarsh is a fine narrator of her own work, I just got tired of the same thing over and over. Maybe, if she decides to write a work of long-form journalism, I’ll read that. This one wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t absolutely enamored with it, either.