Journalist Smarsh explores socio-economic class and poverty through an account of her low-income, rural Kansas-based extended family.In her first book, addressed to her imaginary daughterthe author, born in 1980, is childless by choicethe author emphasizes how those with solid financial situations often lack understanding about families such as hers. Smarsh, a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, lived a nomadic life until becoming a first-generation college student. Smarsh vowed to herself and her imaginary daughter to escape the traps that enslaved her mother, grandmothers, female cousins, and others in her family. "So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grown-up's nightmare," she writes. "Ours happened to be about poverty, which comes with not just psychological dangers but mortal ones, too." Because the author does not proceed chronologically, the numerous strands of family history can be difficult to follow. However, Smarsh would almost surely contend that the specific family strands are less important for readers to grasp than the powerful message of class bias illustrated by those strands. As the author notes, given her ambition, autodidactic nature, and extraordinary beauty, her biological mother could have made more of herself in a different socio-economic situation. But the reality of becoming a teenage mother created hurdles that Smarsh's mother could never overcome; her lack of money, despite steady employment, complicated every potential move upward. The author's father, a skilled carpenter and overall handyman, was not a good provider or a dependable husband, but her love for him is fierce, as is her love for grandparents beset by multiple challenges. While she admits that some of those challenges were self-created, others were caused by significant systemic problems perpetuated by government at all levels. Later, when Smarsh finally reached college, she faced a new struggle: overcoming stereotypes about so-called "white trash." Then, she writes, "I began to understand the depth of the rift that is economic inequality."A potent social and economic message embedded within an affecting memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Journalist Smarsh uses her background growing up in rural Kansas to illustrate the economic plight of the rural working poor. Born in 1980, her childhood was a time of increasing economic instability, especially for farmers. The "farm crisis" of the 1980s caused many who lost their farms to foreclosure to flee to the cities. Her family remained on the farm but lost their construction business. The women had been teenage mothers going back generations, and the author's reminisces are often addressed to the child she consciously chose not to have as a teen, the "child of poverty," in order to break this cycle. By interweaving memoir, history, and social commentary, this book serves as a countervailing voice to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which blamed individual choices, rather than sociological circumstances, for any one person ending up in poverty. Smarsh believes the American Dream is a myth, noting that success is more dependent on where you are born and to whom. VERDICT Will appeal to readers who enjoy memoirs and to sociologists. While Smarsh ends on a hopeful note, she offers a searing indictment of how the poor are viewed and treated in this country.-Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Growing up as one of the working poor has become a familiar theme of memoirs of late, but this book is more than a female-authored Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Smarsh employs an unusual and effective technique, throughout the book addressing her daughter, who does not, in reality, exist. Rather, she's the future that seemed destined for Smarsh, the same future that had been destined for and realized by all the women in her family. Smarsh comes from a long line of women who married young, survived with barely enough money, and continually scrabbled along with low-paying jobs while trying to stay one step ahead of domestic violence or eviction. All of this was to be her legacy despite the strong work ethic, self-sufficiency, and pride that also run in her family. Smarsh was finally able to climb out of difficult circumstances, but her story is a trenchant analysis of the realities of an economic inequality whose cultural divide allows ""the powerful to make harmful decisions in policy and politics."" Elucidating reading on the challenges many face in getting ahead.--Joan Curbow Copyright 2018 Booklist

SARAH SMARSH'S MEMOIR, "Heartland," opens with a perplexing ode to an imaginary baby. "I'm glad you never ended up as a physical reality in my life. But we talked for so many years that I don't guess I'll ever stop talking to you." Throughout the book an apparition of the author's unborn child pops into the prose like Ally McBeal's Baby Cha-Cha, inducing the otherwise sage Smarsh to write in the inexorably sentimental second person. Forgive the baby. We all have our best registers, our natural octaves, and Smarsh's is the grounded, oral, anecdotal range of her hardscrabble Kansas kinfolk. Fortunately, the tales of their adventures and misadventures make up the majority of her elucidating first book, about the working poor in the Midwest. "They speak a firm sort of poetry, made of things and actions," Smarsh writes. She is most eloquent when she does too, mixing lived experience with a learned perspective. Smarsh escaped poverty, she believes, because, unlike her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, she didn't become a teenage mom. In part, she says, this was because she was among the first generation of her family to have at least one constant home, dating to when her maternal grandmother, Betty, married her seventh husband, Arnie. (By contrast, Smarsh's mom, Jeannie, moved 48 times before starting high school.) Such is the reality of poverty. The memoir flickers to life at that home, a humble farmhouse on 160 acres of wheat fields outside Wichita. With an abundance of land and an under- abundance of cash, Arnie gleefully invents new forms of entertainment. One weekend he loads family and their sloshing solo cups into a tattered canoe, hitches it to his truck and rips through the snowy fields. Through the stories of Smarsh's witty but withholding mother, her tender but luckless father, her generous stepgrandfather and hazardously vivacious grandmother, Smarsh shows how the poor seldom have the vantage to identify the systemic forces suppressing them. Rather, they make do. From the farm, the book circumambulates several major themes: body, land, shame. Smarsh describes the toll of labor on those who have no choice but to do it - awork force priced out of health insurance by its privatization. Neighbors are maimed by combines and the author's father nearly dies from chemical poisoning a week into a job transporting used cleaning solvent. Women absorb their husbands' frustrations, blow by blow. Meanwhile, big agribusinesses strangle the region's family farms, leaving behind a brackish residue of shame - the shame of being poor and white. "Poor whiteness," Smarsh writes, "is a peculiar offense in that society imbues whiteness with power - not just by making it the racial norm next to which the rest are 'others' but by using it as a shorthand for economic stability." Smarsh is an invaluable guide to flyover country, worth 20 abstract-noun-espousing op-ed columnists. She was raised by those who voted against their own interests. "People on welfare were presumed 'lazy,' and for us there was no more hurtful word," she writes. "Within that framework, financially comfortable liberals may rest assured that their fortunes result from personal merit while generously insisting they be taxed to help the 'needy.' Impoverished people, then, must do one of two things: Concede personal failure and vote for the party more inclined to assist them, or vote for the other party, whose rhetoric conveys hope that the labor of their lives is what will compensate them." A deeply humane memoir with crackles of clarifying insight, "Heartland" is one of a growing number of important works - including Matthew Desmond's "Evicted" and Amy Goldstein's "Janesville" - that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America's postindustrial decline. Or, perhaps, simply: class. It's a term that Smarsh argues wasn't mentioned during her childhood in the 1980s and '90s. "This lack of acknowledgment at once invalidated what we were experiencing and shamed us if we tried to express it." With deftprimers on the Homestead Act, the farming crisis of the '80s and Reaganomics, Smarsh shows how the false promise of the "American dream" was used to subjugate the poor. It's a powerful mantra. But so too is What would I tell my daughter? Smarsh invokes her unborn baby in this memoir because asking this question, she says, is what kept her life on track, enabling her to chase an education and take advantage of the can-do attitude that is her inheritance. What would I tell my daughter? is an effective life hack, immediately summoning one's purest intentions and aspirations. Unlike the American dream, it isn't premised on abstract hope but on concrete advice. It cuts the crap. FRANCESCA MARI is a senior editor at The California Sunday Magazine.

"Class is an illusion with real consequences," Smarsh writes in this candid and courageous memoir of growing up in a family of working-class farmers in Kansas during the 1980s and '90s. A writing professor and journalist whose work has appeared in the Guardian and the New Yorker, Smarsh tells her story to her inner child, whose "unborn spirit" allows Smarsh to break the cycle of poverty that constrained her family for generations. Smarsh was born to a teenage mother, and the women in her family were all young mothers who hardened and aged early from the work it took to survive the day-to-day. Smarsh writes with love and care about these women and the men who married them, including her father and Grandpa Arnie, but she also lays bare their hardships (for many poor women, "there is a violence to merely existing: the pregnancies without health care, the babies that can't be had, the repetitive physical jobs") and the shame of being poor ("to experience economic poverty... is to live with constant reminders of what you don't have"). It is through education that Smarsh is able to avoid their fate; but while hers is a happy ending, she is still haunted by the fact that being poor is associated with being bad. Smarsh's raw and intimate narrative exposes a country of economic inequality that "has failed its children." Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.