By Jessie Knadler
Berkley, $24.95, 336 pages
Quirky, laugh-out-loud funny, poignant, passionate, new beginnings, and chickens all describe Rurally Screwed: My Life off the Grid with the Cowboy I Love by Jessie Knadler. It’s a classic fairy tale: New York magazine editor gives up her flagging career and Kundalini yoga to marry a twenty-five-year-old bull rider she met at the annual bucking horse sale in the badlands of Montana. Whereupon her hard partying, Manhattan lifestyle turns to chopping firewood, sewing, canning, and raising chickens in Virginia, all the while wondering “What the… did I do?”
“As I saw it, there was only one solution to my current existential crisis: make out with a cowboy.”
When getting swept off her feet by a Garth Brooks-listening, gun-owning, Republican cowboy wears off and reality sets in, Knadler is left with reality with a workaholic husband who can get called off to war, leaving her with moonshine, Bible club, and a serious lack of decent Thai food.
Rurally Screwed is a great love story that carries on past “I Do” and “Happily Ever After.” It deals with relationships when the shiny newness wears off and the grim day-to-day trials of love are left. The book is much the same as Knadler describes her wedding and marriage: energetic, individual, and a tiny bit nuts.
Reviewed by Axie Barclay
