Miracle Country by
Kendra Atleework
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
A beautiful memoir featuring the lack of water in the Owens ValleyKendra Atleework was raised in Swall Meadows, a very small town about twenty miles north-west of Bishop, California. She starts her memoir by telling us about a wildfire that swept through the area in 2015. Her father thought his home was about to burn. While reading this I relived my own memories of losing my home in a California forest fire in 2020. Fortunately their home didn't burn, but others in the town were not so lucky.
The memoir meandered through time to when her parents bought that house and remodeled it. She focused in on her mother and her rare autoimmune disorder that eventually caused her early death when Kendra was still a teenager. Her father tried to keep the family together after that, but all were heavy with grief.
Kendra's memoir drifted into environmental history featuring William Mullholland and Mary Austin, author of
The Land of Little Rain, another book about the Owens Valley, published in 1903. William Mullholland was the creator of the Los Angeles Aqueduct which drained the Owens Lake near where Kendra's family lived, starting in 1913. Owens Valley is now extremely dry and subject to droughts.
Eventually Kendra grew up and the memoir went on to tell about her experience of living in Los Angeles and later in Minnesota. I can't say there was a cohesive storyline but one gets used to the meandering storytelling of this author whose life in the Owens Valley was never far from her heart, no matter where she went. I very much enjoyed her writing style.
I was driven to read this book by my own experience of traveling through the Owens Valley on Highway 395, returning to my far-northern California home after visiting my sister who lives near San Diego. On the way south a few weeks earlier I drove on Highway 5, then on old 99 down through the San Joaquin Valley. The experience of extremely high traffic there inspired me to return north via 395 on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was a great decision for avoiding traffic and I gratefully loved the beauty and serenity of that area.
This was my second-time-ever to drive through Bishop and I was highly impressed with the town and the area in general. I stopped at the June Lake Junction and found Kendra's book in the little store there. He had a paperback version and a hardcover. I thought the cover of the hardcover version was extremely beautiful but due to my own economic situation I felt I had to opt for the paperback. I bought it and considered it a great treasure. I will not be giving it away.
The entire area on the eastern side of the Sierras felt and looked extremely beautiful to me. If I weren't locked into my life in far-northern California, I'd consider this area while looking for another home. There are lakes there, however as Kendra's book points out, Owens Lake is not one of them anymore. While writing this review I went to Google Maps and inserted the words "Owens Lake" -- and got nothing in return. That lake has surely been decimated.
It is a sad story of lost water and an arid climate, but overall, I think it is good all the thirsty people stayed in Los Angeles. I would not want them all to migrate to Bishop in search of water to drink. That would be far, far worse than the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, don't you think?
This book was the group read in June 2026 for the group,
California Reading.
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