Archive for June, 2013

Cool Down With a Delicious Bootstrapper Cocktail

June 25th, 2013

It’s the summer of 2005, and Mardi Jo Link’s dream of living the simple life has unraveled into debt, heartbreak, and perpetually ragged cuticles. She and her husband of nineteen years have just called it quits, leaving her with serious cash-flow problems and a looming divorce. More broke than ever, Link makes a seemingly impossible resolution: to hang on to her century-old farmhouse in northern Michigan and continue to raise her three boys on well water and wood chopping and dirt.

Armed with an unfailing sense of humor and three resolute accomplices, Link confronts blizzards and foxes, learns about Zen divorce and the best way to butcher a hog, dominates a zucchini-growing contest and wins a year’s supply of local bread, masters the art of bargain cooking, wrangles rampaging poultry, and withstands any blow to her pride in order to preserve the life she wants.

Celebrate this summer’s victories with this nice cool lemonade cocktail. Enjoy a pitcher with your book club as you discuss Bootstrapper, the memoir Garrison Keillor calls a “heroic-comic saga of single motherhood, pure stubbornness, and the loyalty of three young sons.”

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