Review - Rurally Screwed by Jessie Knadler

Title: Rurally Screwed
My Life Off the Grid with the Cowboy I Love
Author: Jessie Knadler
Publisher: Berkley
Publish Date: Apr 3, 2012
Hardcover, 336 pages

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I went in to this book thinking it would be very similar to Pioneer Woman's book Black Heels to Tractor Wheels about meeting her husband, but I was surprised that it was really different. It had a similar feel, but otherwise it was it's own book.

Jessie is a woman living in New York striving to find out who she is and what she can do in the magazine world, but things just don't seem to be working out. In fact, they go horribly wrong and she is fired which leads her on a journey to being a freelance writer in cowboy town - ironically her home town. She grew up on the farm and did everything she could to get away and have a more city-fied life. Then she meets a man she falls in love with, but he has designs on staying a cowboy, living on a ranch and doing the things you do in a small rural town. He is religious and hard working. Though Jessie tries her hardest to fit in, it may not be the fit for her.

I really enjoyed though Jessie was going through many things that could have made her bitter, she still kept her chin up and didn't go into a huge spiral depression.

 Summary -
Jessie Knadler was a New York City girl, through and through. An editor for a splashy women's magazine, she splurged on Miu Miu, partied hard, lived for Kundalini yoga, and dated a man-boy whose complexion was creamier than her own. Circling the drain both personally and professionally, Jessie definitely wouldn't have described herself as "happy"; more like caustically content. Then one day, she was assigned a story about an annual rodeo in the badlands of Eastern Montana.

There, she met a twenty-five-year-old bull rider named Jake. He voted Republican and read Truck Trader. He listened to Garth Brooks. He owned guns. And Jessie suddenly found herself blindsided by something with which she was painfully unfamiliar: a genuinely lovable disposition. In fact, Jake radiated such optimism and old-school gentlemanliness that Jessie impulsively ditched Manhattan for an authentic existence, and an authentic man. Almost overnight, she was canning and sewing, making jerky, chopping firewood, and raising chickens. And all the while one question was ringing in the back of her head: "What the !#*$ have I done with my life?"

A hilarious true-life love story, Rurally Screwed reveals what happens to a woman who gives up everything she's ever known and wanted-job security, money, her professional network, access to decent Thai food-to live off the grid with her one true love (and dogs and horses and chickens), and asks, is it worth it? The answer comes amid war, Bible clubs, and moonshine.