Book Review of Where Coyotes Howl by Sandra Dallas

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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320 pages, to be published April 2023

YOU MAY ENJOY THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE:

Books set in Wyoming * Historical Fiction * Western American Fiction * Novels by Willa Cather

TRAVEL INSPIRATION:

Where Coyotes Howl is set in the Wyoming prairie during the early 20th century. The presence of the sweeping prairie, its unforgiving climate, and the hardships of subsistence living paint a clear picture of this place and moment in time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: sandra dallas

Sandra Dallas has written 16 novels, 10 books of non-fiction, and 4 young adult novels. Dallas has long lived in the Rocky Mountains and spent 25 years as a writer for Business Week, based in Denver, Colorado. While serving as a reporter, Dallas tackled several works of non-fiction before shifting her focus to writing fiction, where the Western US features predominantly. She has won a number of awards for her works of fiction.

While Where Coyotes Howl was my first introduction to Dallas, I look forward to reading more of her novels in the future.

REVIEW OF where coyotes howl BY sandra dallas

Where Coyotes Howl begins with Ellen's arrival in Wyoming, in search of a new life away from her family in Iowa. She has been hired to serve as the local teacher after the prior teacher lasted a year, in what turns out to be a trend in the community.

Within moments, it is clear that most of Ellen's clothing and her small allocation of personal belongings that made the trek are no match for the dusty, hardscrabble life on the prairie in the early twentieth century United States.

She boards at the home of Ruth McGinty and her husband, a truly foul human whose depths of depravity only descend further with each interaction. His relatively minor atrocities in the novel's early pages include him peaking through the wooden slats of Ellen's room from outside the house. Not only is that reflective of McGinty's creepiness but also a window into the type of house they live in: there are spots between boards where the inside and outside mix. In the winter, Ellen even awakens to snow on her bed. And the McGintys have an actual home compared to those who live in the earthen shoddies. At one point when Ellen nearly finds herself living in a shoddy, she quickly retreats when a rattlesnake squirms its way through the wall into the home. That is an image that will long stick with me!

Where Coyotes Howl introduces the reader to this particular time and place where neighbors - sprinkled at relatively vast distances from each other - have to rely on each other to survive. They are an eclectic bunch - those who found their way to the community through happenstance and those from comfortable existence in the East who decided to try their hand at homesteading. Most of these experiments are unsuccessful and lead to unsavory outcomes.

Ellen finds happiness in Wyoming, quickly becoming enamored with a cowboy named Charlie, and the novel follows their trials and tribulations in this rough terrain. Ellen is a lucky one in her marriage compared to several of the couples nearby, but that doesn't protect the couple from heartbreak in the land where the cold howl of the coyote, echoing across the plains, turns Ellen's blood to ice.

Where Coyotes Howl creates a vibrant community of colorful characters, and has an active plot moving them forward to their eventual outcomes that, in retrospect, seem fatalistically predetermined. But as a reader, I didn't want to look away.