Title: This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone
Author: Melissa Coleman
First published March 31, 2011
336 pages, Hardcover
ISBN: 9780061958328 (ISBN10: 0061958328)
Rating: 3.72
Overview
With a poetic and honest voice, Melissa Coleman shares the moving story of her family’s journey towards sustainability in her stirring memoir, This Life Is in Your Hands. Set along the rugged Maine coastline in the 1970s, Coleman’s childhood was shaped by her family’s brave experiment in communal living and their search for a self-sufficient lifestyle.
In this poignant and powerful memoir, Coleman explores the hope and struggle behind her upbringing, revealing the personal quest for truth that her experiences produced. Reminiscent of The Glass Castle and Educated, This Life Is in Your Hands is a captivating and inspiring tale of a family’s resilience and determination in the face of adversity.
Editoral Review
This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone by Melissa Coleman is a poignant memoir that explores the complexities of living off the land and the devastating consequences of unchecked idealism. Readers are taken on a journey through the author’s childhood in rural Maine, where her parents, Eliot and Sue Coleman, tried to create a utopian haven in the 1960s and 1970s.
Melissa Coleman is the daughter of Eliot and Sue and the author of This Life Is in Your Hands. As an adult, she reflects on her childhood and the events that unfolded on their homestead.
In this memoir, she blends the personal and the political, exploring themes such as love, loss, identity, and the tensions that arise when idealism and reality collide. The book opens with Eliot and Sue purchasing sixty acres of land in Maine and building a house with their own hands.
The family begins to homestead, growing their food and raising their animals, and they soon become an inspiration to others in the area. However, as time passes, the isolation takes a toll on the family, and the pressures of maintaining the homestead become overwhelming.
Family secrets, personal tragedies, and legal disputes ultimately unravel the dream, and the family is left with a legacy of pain and regret. Coleman’s writing is beautiful and vivid, evoking the sights, sounds, and smells of rural Maine.
She skillfully weaves together the personal and the political, showing how the Coleman family’s story is emblematic of the larger cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. She also examines the environmental and social implications of homesteading, shedding light on the complexities of sustainability and self-sufficiency.
While the memoir is a compelling read, it can feel disjointed at times, with the author jumping back and forth between different periods and perspectives. The book also relies heavily on excerpts from the journals of Eliot and Sue, which can be jarring and disrupt the narrative flow.
However, these flaws do not detract from the overall impact of the book. This Life Is in Your Hands will appeal to readers interested in memoirs, environmentalism, and contemporary issues such as sustainability and self-sufficiency.
It is a moving and thought-provoking testament to the power of human, idealistic dreams, and its devastating consequences when they are unchecked. Readers will be left with a sense of empathy and understanding for both the Coleman family and the larger social and political context of their story.
I would give this book a score of 4 out of 5. While it has some flaws, it is still a beautifully written memoir that will stay with readers long after they finish reading it.
