“Almost Animal is an electric work of personal archaeology, a layered reckoning with lineage and landscape, claustrophobia and wilderness, what we receive and what we disrupt—full of vigils, cliff-faces, dreams, vistas, terrors, creatures, and guides. This book is unafraid of darkness; it goes spelunking right into those darkest nights of the soul as caverns full of history and truth. Amy Irvine is clear-eyed in her self-interrogations and full-throated in her love songs. This is a capacious, generous, and genuinely searching book—I’m so grateful that it’s here.”—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams“Searing . . . This unflinching self-examination offers a road map for how to learn from one’s past.”—Publishers Weekly“Amy Irvine’s explorations of the shadow side of Mormon history are a revelatory lantern fearlessly exploring a black hole. Yet her stories are also freighted with happy surprises, like a care dog who helps heal an ailing child, the incredible horseback skills of women in today’s American West, and above all Irvine’s relentless determination to triumph against formidable odds and bring her odyssey to a satisfying close. Almost Animal is a wondrous read from an author of remarkable strength.”—David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K “If we have any hope of surviving this time of terror and greed, we need to begin telling the truth, about our own wildness, about the catastrophe of motherhood, about the ways we have failed to protect this spectacular planet whose bounty gave us life. Amy Irvine is a relentless and fearless truth teller, full of rage and love, bighearted and more than a little feral. Her beautifully forged, ferociously rendered story of fracture and reassemblage will stop your heart, will make you want to ride the war horses into battle on behalf of every Earthly creature, be it child, mountain lion, or snake. I’ll be there too, flanked on all sides by a battalion of wild women, Mormon and Pagan, ancestral and alive, with little left to lose and everything to save.”—Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country “Lyrical . . . A memoir about a daring life, Almost Animal is about personal hardships, family love, and the nature and landscapes of the West.”—Foreword Reviews “With a formidable intellect and gutsy vulnerability, Amy Irvine explores and connects her Mormon lineage to her motherly struggles raising a sick daughter in the American West. Readers will marvel at this tough mountain woman for her tenacious love of her daughter, her intuitive trust of the earth’s healing powers, and her ease with animals of all kinds. A raging river of a story, Almost Animal will inspire readers with its wisdom and strong environmental values.”—Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender“Amy Irvine’s voice runs at a hot, wild pitch, masterful and steeped in ghosts. In Almost Animal, she’s written a starting place for healing our upended selves, families, culture, world. If anyone can forge a way through these crazy twists and turns, through fractured desert and the beasts and dreams that dwell there, it’s her.”—Craig Childs, author of The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild“In Almost Animal, Amy Irvine is a mother on horseback, fiercely and intimately navigating the destructive myths of the American West that obscure both profound violence and indispensable lessons for survival. Whether reckoning with her own inheritance as a descendant of early Mormon settlers, wildly galloping to the edges of maternal love and terror, or contemplating the joyful resilience of ravens, Irvine’s prose is as trenchant as it is luminous. This is an astonishing, unforgettable memoir—a must-read for all who are contending with how historical trauma lives within us.”—Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks Praise for Trespass“A singularly elegiac and astringent memoir of dissent.”—Chicago Tribune“It’s hard to imagine a personal history more transporting than this one.”—Los Angeles Times “Fierce . . . The most vivid ground-level report from this war zone that I have ever read.”—The Washington Post “Trespass is a flare shot up amid troubling forces and asks us not to imagine a new West, but instead to re-envision ourselves as its inhabitants.”—Robert Redford“A harrowing and angry book that ultimately wins us over by sheer, naked honesty . . . Irvine eloquently presents her defense of the Western landscape and the integrality of her own life.”—Jim Harrison“Bold and original in her thinking, candid and lyrical in expression, Irvine launches a penetrating critique of Mormon sovereignty, the persistent oppression of women, the longing to belong versus the need to be one’s self, and the environmental havoc wrought by cattle ranching, ‘extreme recreationists’ and the federally sanctioned, post-9/11 rush to extract fossil fuels from protected public lands. . . . [She] joins red-rock heroes Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams in breaking ranks and speaking up for the living world.”—Booklist (starred review)
