In 1929, barely 21 years old, Ruth Farley heads west and claims a homestead in an isolated canyon in Southern California, at that time still the land of rough-and-ready miners and cowboys. What is she looking for? She doesn't quite know, but she knows what she doesn't want - a conventional woman's life of settled domesticity. To Ruth, avoiding this fate means she must be totally independent and self-sufficient. Ruth is stubborn, brave, strong, and subject to fits of free-ranging lust that she is not always successful at keeping under control, although she makes weak attempts at it. With 21-year-old chutzpah, she assumes that she can spit in the eye of conventional norms for women without paying a high price for it, and she protects this naive idea with a cavalier disregard for what people think of her.

Part of her delusion is that she can carve out an independent life for herself in an isolated mountain region without the help and support of neighbors. A major early story line of the book is her stubborn insistence on moving, entirely alone, a boulder that must be removed before she can lay the foundation for her cabin. The boulder could be easily handled with the help of neighbors, or by using a couple of horses and rope to drag it to a new location, but Ruth is determined to do it herself. The story of her struggles with the boulder, and her eventual triumph over it, becomes a metaphor for Everywoman's struggle to achieve independence against overwhelming odds. Any rebellious, misfit woman who has learned from hard experience that "what doesn't kill us makes us strong" will identify deeply and emotionally with this element of the story.

Unfortunately, succeeding at moving the boulder by herself reinforces Ruth's confidence in the idea that she doesn't need anybody. The rest of the book is a harrowing account of what she pays for this delusion, coming close to death at the hands of violent men and again at the hands of Nature, and seeing the first true love of her life killed because she is a white woman who has taken an Indian lover. Ultimately, of course, she has to learn to see life, Nature, and people as they really are - complicated, unpredictable, sometimes violent, and sometimes unexplainably compassionate.

If the book has a weakness, it is that even though Ruth is complex and multifaceted, some of the other characters are rather flat - her Indian lover Jim, for example, is unbelievably flawless. But in the context of this compelling story, I wasn't bothered much by that.

True "literary" writing expresses the universal through the particular, and in my view this book may well become a classic parable of what we pay, men as well as women, for defying cultural norms, and what we must do to come to terms with those norms without losing our truest Selves in the process.

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