Publisher’s Weekly: " . . . Readers with pioneer envy will get vicarious thrills from this high-energy memoir. With a keen eye for detail . . . Fields delivers the lowdown on 23 years of commercial salmon fishing on a remote island off Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska.
Kirkus Review:
“ . . . Vivid details and intelligent insights invigorate this celebration of the human spirit.”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “A woman who divides her time between teaching college English and commercial salmon fishing pens a powerful memoir of her family life on Kodiak Island after leaving the East Coast behind as a 20-year old newlywed.
Sports Illustrated: Women:
Chosen as “This month’s best books for active women” “In the late 1970's, Leyland Fields moved with her new husband from the East Coast to a remote region of Alaska. There she became one of the few women to work in commercial salmon fishing. Her engrossing memoir chronicles the grueling and sometimes treacherous existence she chose, which included settling on two uninhabited islands, building houses from scratch, gutting deer and intermittently traveling around the world.”
Booklist:
“...To deem this solely a memoir of her life spent as the wife of a salmon fisherman on a remote Alaskan island would be missing the boat, so to speak, for Fields’ powerful poetic prose deals with themes as large as the great outdoors in which she struggles to make her way and find her place. Barely out of her teens, Fields marries Duncan, determined to share the life he loves, every backbreaking hour of it: sailing the open ocean in a tiny skiff, harvesting salmon the way it hasalways been done: dragging them in my nets, picking them out by hand. Just as Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, so, too, do the Fields live on this ocean, without electricity, or telephones, with bears and eagles as their constant companions, choosing it as much for what it offers as for what it omits. Paying homage to man’s flexibility and gratitude for God’s grace, Fields’ memoir is haunting in its imagery, uplifting in its message.”
For a personally inscribed copy, email leslieleylandfields@gmail.com
