REVIEW: The Hired Man: A Novel by Sandra Dallas
The Dust Bowl sweeps a handsome stranger into a small Colorado town to dangerous effect
1937. It’s been seven years since the dust storms started in Colorado. Folks can barely remember a time when the clouds were filled with rain instead of dirt, and when the fields were green instead of brown. High school student Martha Helen Kessler and her family are luckier than most; they still eke out a living from the land. Even so, evidence of the Dust Bowl’s grim impact on families, especially on the women who bear the brunt of their husbands’ frustration and their children’s hunger, is everywhere.
When Martha Helen’s compassionate mother insists they take in Otis Hobbs, a handsome drifter who saves a local boy from a vicious storm, she quickly discovers a darker side to their rural community. Suspicion, jealousy, and prejudice grip their neighbors – and emotions reach a frenzy after Martha Helen’s best friend, Frankie, disappears and is then found murdered. Ultimately, Martha Helen is forced to make sense of her conflicting feelings and loyalties in order to help find retribution and to reconcile the difference between the law and justice.
Full of period detail and Sandra Dallas’s trademark focus on the lives of women, The Hired Man entertains and ultimately surprises.
CW/TW – misogyny, lots of domestic violence, death from cancer, murder, mention of past rape
Dear Ms. Dallas,
Last year’s “Tough Luck,” got you back on my reading radar and I was excited to see that this book would be set in the 20th century, unlike the first two books of yours I’ve read. Well, I like it, I think the women are strong in the face of period misogyny and the stress of the Dust Bowl, but it is just so unrelentingly down for most of the story.
Martha Helen Kessler’s family is managing to hang on during the seventh year of the dust storms that have ruined families and crushed the spirits of those who have ‘dusted out’ and left looking for salvation elsewhere. Hobos drift through, making the townspeople edgy and nervous and we all know what can happen when a crowd gets edgy and nervous. When one ‘vag’ saves the life of a local boy caught out in a dust storm, Mrs. Kessler – a woman who truly believes in being a Good Samaritan and “doing unto others” offers him a job on their farm. The town isn’t happy but Otis proves to be a hard worker even if his presence seems to stir things up.
When Martha Helen’s good friend is found murdered, and Otis is the one who finds her body during the search, the town is sure he’s the killer. Stares, comments, and harassment are aimed at the Kessler family. Mrs. Kessler continues to stick up for him in the face of many people just wishing Otis would take off and leave. Why is she so determined to risk Otis’s, and her family’s, safety to see justice done? And what will Martha Helen do in the face of it all?
Though the story is told through the eyes of fifteen – almost sixteen – year old Martha Helen, it’s much darker than last year’s “Tough Luck.” Times are indeed hard and as the blurb mentions, women are expected to be upbeat in the face of their husband’s depression and anger, have dinner on the table, and look after their children. There is a lot of domestic violence in the story, browbeating men, and hopelessness in the face of withering crops and no rain. One of Martha Helen’s (also fifteen years old) friends is almost married off to a thuggish waste of space and that description is being kind to him. Poor Frankie watches her father repeatedly beat her mother before mom steals off in the night and leaves Frankie to take over running the house – and that is obviously before Frankie is murdered. Things are grim in Burke, Colorado.
But the Kessler family is a bright spot. Martha Helen’s parents are still obviously in love, which is great because her first marriage was a disaster she won’t talk about. Martha Helen’s older brother has left for California and younger brother Henry is a sweetheart. When a local woman who talked her husband into adopting an orphan dies, and he takes the boy back to the orphanage, Mr. and Mrs. Kessler agree that Willie needs to come live with them. I would have liked to know how the Kessler’s were managing to do better at farming than their neighbors but that was never explained.
Martha Helen watches everything going on and begins to ask pointed questions and demand answers. Even a few months ago, her parents wouldn’t have agreed to her being present for a lot of the events in the story so we get to see her mentally growing up and looking at things through more adult eyes. Given the hardship the area has gone through, I think she’s a bit more mature than I was at her age.
She sees her parents doing the right thing over and over in the face of public pressure. She questions what she knows and thinks vs what the town demands. She stands up for seeing justice done and protects and defends her family. Then she finally learns what is behind her mother’s determination. When Martha Helen discovers Something Else, she will have to decide how she wants to see justice done about it. What she chooses might not sit well with people but I thought it covered a lot of bases.
The book features lots of families but is mainly a book about women – women’s resilience in the face of hardship and husbands turned mean by circumstances or just bad husbands to begin with. Martha Helen and her friends have few choices to achieve their dreams for college or just something different. Martha Helen also gets a front row seat to proper law enforcement vs vigilante justice, jumping to conclusions vs evidence, and a trial. Moral dilemmas fill the book and the ending is not one I predicted or expected but is one that, along with the epilogue, satisfies me. B
~Jayne
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