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One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone
Harper
April 2011
On Sale: April 12, 2011
366 pages
ISBN: 0061958328
EAN: 9780061958328
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Set on a rugged coastal homestead during the 1970s, This
Life Is in Your Hands introduces a superb young writer
driven by the need to uncover the truth of a childhood
tragedy and connect anew with the beauty and vitality of the
back-to-the-land ideal that shaped her early years. In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman's parents, Eliot and
Sue—a handsome, idealistic young couple from well-to-do
families—pack a few essentials into their VW truck and
abandon the complications of modern reality to carve a farm
from the woods. They move to a remote peninsula on the coast
of Maine and become disciples of Helen and Scott Nearing,
authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life. On
sixty acres of sandy, intractable land, Eliot and Sue begin
to forge a new existence, subsisting on the crops they grow
and building a home with their own hands. While they establish a happy family and achieve their
visionary goals, the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes
at a price. Winters are long and lean, summers frenetic with
the work of the harvest, and the distraction of the many
young farm apprentices threatens the Colemans' marriage.
Then, one summer day when Melissa is seven, her
three-year-old sister, Heidi, wanders off and drowns in the
pond where she liked to play. In the wake of the accident,
ideals give way to human frailty, divorce, and a mother's
breakdown—and ultimately young Melissa is abandoned to the
care of neighbors. What really happened, and who, if anyone,
is to blame? This Life Is in Your Hands is the search to understand a
complicated past; a true story, both tragic and redemptive,
it tells of the quest to make a good life, the role of fate,
and the power of forgiveness.
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