Not quite what I expected as I gingerly tried to wade through all the oil fields! I had thought that the book would be more centered on a woman on the prairie and the life she led, but it was more geology than biography. Interesting for someone interested in the land itself and the changes it wrought as technology came into play.

No doubt Erika Bolstad, the author, did painstaking research for too many hours and years to count, from various sources on the ground and in archives, and although few in number, her own family's records; however, to be frank, this memoir was really not for me. The idea about searching back through records about ones' ancestor, IS appealing but all the in depth "facts and figures" about oil, and all that entails and attaches itself onto that industry, certainly does not. No doubt, I probably should be interested due to the affect of this industry's "don't really care" attitudes on the environment, which Bolstad unveils, that are evident even in today's world but sorry to say, I found it rather dry reading.
The connection to the two (Anna and Erika) though, was through the hopeful Anna-the-homesteader's claim to mineral rights that produced sporadic, minimal "windfall" for her descendants two to three generations down line (Erika is one of them), from an oil company paying out for the lease thereof. Those who do like to watch North Dakota crude oil prices fluctuate per barrel, from month-to-month and year after year, (in this book from December 2009 to June 2021) and talk about oil boom and bust cycles and major politicians who get involved, may find the book interesting.

~Eunice C., Reviewer/Blogger~

July 2022
~Eunice C., Reviwer/Blogger~

July 2022

Disclaimer: This is my honest opinion based on the review copy sent by NetGalley and Source Books (publisher).

Windfall feels like a reflection on all that is sad. The author ties together her personal struggles with infertility, the commitment of two of her ancestors to asylums, the boom and bust cycles of North Dakota, and the oil industry's indifference to anything that does not increase their profits. It all fits together beautifully, but sadly.

What attracted me to this book was the author hunting down family history, axed on a homestead claim in North Dakota that her mother inherited a portion of the mineral rights.
I found all the research and revelations about what really happened to Anna, Bolstad’s great grandmother, endlessly fascinating because I eat that stuff up. What happened to Martha, the great-great grandmother was even more tragic.
I skimmed over the side streets the author tended to veer down, hammering on climate change. That’s not why I read the book so I didn’t invest in it.
I do know that it was drilled into my head by my family that you never ever renounce any kinds of mineral or water rights to any land you might own. I wasn’t surprised at the decision Bolstad arrives at the end.

Thank you Sourcebooks and Net Galley for providing me with an advance reader’s copy of “Windfall: The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her” by Erika Bolstad. The “windfall” of the title refers to the royalties that journalist Erika Bolstad inherited upon her mother’s death. The royalties were paid by oil company that had leased the windswept land the author’s great grandmother, Anna Josephine Sletvold, had obtained in 1905 after filing for a homestead in North Dakota. Bolstad takes the reader along with her as she uncovers facts about her ancestors, part of a wave of Norwegian immigrants who arrived in Minnesota in the 1860s and 1870s. Although the historical record is sparse, and shockingly grim, Bolstad is able to painstakingly recreate the life of Anna.

Bolstad then takes a longer view, examining the history of North Dakota and the impact of the oil boom on the State. She addresses the playful, such as inability of employers in the hospitality industry to hire when potential employees are beguiled by potential oil riches (leading a McDonald’s franchise to offer workers a $300 signing bonus), and the serious, such as the effect on women, particularly Indigenous women, in communities populated by transient men lured by lucrative jobs in the oil fields, and the environmental impacts of fracking. Bolstad notes that only the farmers examined the environmental impacts of oil in the 1950s. “Pump jacks and oil derricks looked like money not the destruction of the planet.” The nascent oil industry used propaganda films to sway public opinion favorably. She reports that the oil tycoons “got rich plundering the earth, by taking advantage of lax environmental regulations that prioritized short-term extractive techniques over stewardship, and by strong-arming lawmakers to enact generous tax breaks that allowed oil companies to write off the cost of exploration.”

Bolstad’s background as a reporter who writes about environmental issues is evident throughout the book, but she addresses the environmental toll of the oil industry with a light hand, buoying the subject matter with quirky diversions, such as a side trip to Liberty, Illinois to visit the Mystery Baby-Making Boulder and a visit to Medora, a storied cowboy town established by a rich French aristocrat in 1883, after the Northern Pacific Railroad was completed, who snapped up miles of land with a short-lived plan to send fresh beef to the east on refrigerated rail cars. A thoughtful and entertaining look at the history and effects of land and mineral booms and busts in North Dakota from the perspective of an environmentalist who inherited oil royalties.

I was attracted to this memoir because of my own interest in genealogy and Bolstad's desire to learn more about her great-grandmother Anna, who claimed a plot of land in North Dakota under the Homestead Act in the early 1900s. Unfortunately within a year or so, after having married and given birth to a son, she was committed in an insane asylum. That's all the family really knows about what happened to Anna.

But the mineral rights of her land still bring the family a 'windfall' now and then as oil companies lease the rights to drill for oil. 'We could be rich!' they think, now that oil fracking has become a lucrative endeavor in North Dakota.

As a freelance journalist, Bolstad wants to go sniff out the story there--not only to learn more about what happened to her great-grandmother, and whether their land rights are worth something, but also what effect the oil drilling is having on the land, the environment and the people. Someone is getting rich but, as usual, it's not the workers. Each chapter begins with the price of oil in ND on a certain day because the ups and downs of the industry mean boom or bust for the communities tied to it.

Bolstad spent eight years looking into this information, traveling, doing research, talking to experts. She ties this information nicely to her own family's story. The human side is also represented by Bolstad's admission of her struggle to conceive her own child. The result is an interesting memoir.

I received an arc of this book from the author and publisher via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

Fascinating and illuminating. Ever decided to look into a family legend? That's what Bolstad has done but she's gone further. She's always heard the family could be rich based on a plot of land in the North Dakota badlands but she hadn't heard that her great-grandmother Anna had been placed in an institution by her husband. Anna left nothing for Bolstad to work with but dogged determination and a thirst for knowledge sent her off on a quest to know how Anna's life turned from one of hardscrabble on the prairie with a new baby to essentially being disappeared. And then there's the oil. I was unfamiliar with the business in the region and with the boom and busts it has engendered for those who live and work there. I learned a great deal about all of it and while I was more taken with Anna's story, the two are carefully entwined (along with details of Bolstad's own life). Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A very good read.

This was a good read - it just didn't live up to it's potential and the back cover was very misleading. I thought I was reading a historical novel about a woman who struck out on her own, defied the odds and earned her windfall.

What I got was more political than historical. I also despise what fracking does to the earth, but how can you decry the evils of fossil fuels and then talk of all the mile and tanks of gas used while researching this book. I also disagree that wind power is the saviour of the planet.

Enjoyed the books premise - just not the political parts.

What a very interesting book How Erik Want to trace your family's history And North Dakota oil field. This was a very interesting book because each chapter she "d how much the oil was gonna be. Her family was Homestead in the old days And she traced her ancestry back to Anna who had this Homestead in North Dakota. This was a really interesting eye opening book how the oil fields will really not really producing that much oil. The oil company's bought these land The Homestead is in the fifties because there was a Bloom. Smart ones kept the mineral rights to get some money from your oil companies. And how she interblind her life with her husband how she was trying to get pregnant. I like the story behind Anna how she was very pioneering and Trace to history back to Norway. Was interested and how her family got oil rights from these companies. Her mother was a very interesting person growing up knock in Oregon. There's so many different chapters in this book It kept me very interested. I Anna got this Homestead I And I married a man named Andrew. Anna had a little boy She couldn't handle it so they locked her up. Erica was driving around and And figuring out this how Ann. This author of the book tied a lot of stuff together with history and how this game with the oil fields. It was a it was part romantic story and part mystery as well.

This book would have benefited from tighter editing. There are too many stories fighting for attention, none of them developed into a compelling narrative. Bolstad's family history and infertility struggles tangle with an incomplete history of the oil industry. Along the way, we get random chapters about the displacement of native people, Teddy Roosevelt's time in North Dakota, and the violence women face in the west.

There's the start of a good book here, maybe a couple good books. But together, it didn't work for me.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

This was an extremely disappointing one for me. The description is not at all what the book presents. I’m sure the author has researched thoroughly but I didn’t pick this to learn about environmental issues, oil prices, and politics. And although I relate to the infertility issues-I found it a strange topic to insert into the book.

The author rarely touched on Anna for the first 50-60 pages I read. The rest of the writing is all over the place and dry, as if the author is trying to fit too much into one book. If she focused on one topic it would’ve been more enjoyable. So sadly I had to DNF. What I thought was an interesting search for her family’s past, just seemed to be a stream of consciousness on too many topics.

What a fascinating, yet sad story! This is the second book of a woman being whisked away from her home, family and freedom to be isolated in an asylum because her husband ordered it. The setting is in the early 1900's in the plains and prairies of North Dakota. The author's depiction and research of this time period is fascinating and well-informed. This would be a great asset to our library and more of why I wanted to read it. Instead of hiding away this dark time period, it is there reminding us of the lack of women's rights for this era.
When Erika researches her family's history after her mother informs her of a dark secret, she travels with her husband Chris to find the truth. Not only is the family revealed from its darkest, but the land's structure and all the disasters that follow in this region...droughts, plagues, the cold and the isolation alone can make raising cattle and farming a risky undertaking.
Erika's great-grandmother, Anna, and her husband Andrew Haraseth have a son, Ed and when he was just a baby her husband has her committed to an asylum. With no voice, letters, journals and very few photos it is hard to know the extent of her stay and her situation. I can't imagine the horrors that occurred.
Anna's land contains oil beneath its rich soil and Erika is an heir to its rights. The story leads you into detail of the climate change and the environmental issues that the country is facing. There is so much more that could be added, but the history is lost inside the woman that lost everything.
An excellent job and incredible research that will make a great asset to libraries.
Thank you NetGalley and SOURCEBOOKS (non-fiction) for this ARC in exchange for my review.

As a journalist, Erika Bolstad covered issues that collide with science, technology, climate change, land use, and more. She then uncovered a story about her great-grandmother Anna. Anna was a homesteader on the North Dakota plains at the turn of the century. When Bolstad's mother is dying, she reveals they still own some mineral rights from that land. Bolstad sets out to learn more about their family history as well as investigate the current state of oil extraction in the U.S.

While I enjoyed the premise of this one, I wanted to know more about Anna, how she ended up in an asylum, and more about prairie life back then in general. Perhaps there simply weren't records or letters for the writer to reference for these details. Read via NetGalley.

My post will go live Jan 2.

When a journalist finds that she inherited mineral rights to some property in North Dakota, she is hopeful of getting some money- at least enough to pay for her fertility treatments. What she gains is a wealth of information about a pioneer ancestor with a very interesting personal history, as well as some guilt regarding that ancestor's contributions to climate change, and the United States' exploitation of American Indians.

This novel follows Erika as she researches her great-grandmother. Anna was a homesteader in North Dakota. After giving birth, her husband committed her to an asylum, where she lived out her life.

I did not particularly enjoy this book. I wanted to read about Anna, not about Erika's research into Anna's life. Reading about Erika's research was a bit dry and boring. I found myself skipping passages, wanting to get back to Anna. Overall, this one was just not for me.

Part memoir, part an accounting of the author’s research around the oil industry in the upper Midwest, this book is hard to categorize. I felt like the book description on NetGalley was really misleading. I really expected an interesting historical story about the author’s great-grandmother who established a homestead as a single woman in the early 1900s based on the book description. I did finish this book, unlike some of the previous reviewers but I can certainly understand why they abandoned it. The actual book content was very disappointing to me. I understand that the author did a massive amount of research about the oil industry, mineral rights and homesteading in this part of the country but I am not interested in oil and minerals. And I sympathize with her infertility issues but I also wasn’t expecting a memoir about her struggles. The topics in this book just did not go together and had very little to do with the book description. I really wanted more of the great-grandmother, Mary’s story. I’m guessing that Ms. Borstad just couldn’t find out enough about her great-grandmother for an entire book. I’m no journalist or writer and don’t have the expertise to make suggestions but I think that Mary’s story could have been a terrific basis for some great historical fiction. As written, the book was just boring and not what I wanted to read.
Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks for the Advanced Reader Copy.

While not exactly what I was expecting going into it, I ended up loving this book. I wasn’t sure the juxtaposition of Bolstad’s search for her great-grandmother and the energy industry in North Dakota would necessarily mesh well together, but they did. They did because Bolstad was able to capture how complicated it all actually is, while telling a captivating story that kept me turning pages. As a life-long resident of North Dakota, the state is full of contradictions and at times, an almost overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. The state also has gone through so many boom and bust cycles (not only with oil, but with coal in the early 20th century, albeit on a smaller scale) that I sometimes think we wouldn’t know how to live outside of that cycle. Bolstad captures all these contradictions on the page, and works through her own complicated feelings about her connection to it all in a way that is so relatable. I do wish there had been some more of her great-grandmother Anna’s story, but I know that Bolstad most likely has found all the information she’ll ever find about Anna at this point, because unfortunately, women in Anna’s position were generally hidden away and very little information regarding their lives survive after that. Overall this was a compelling story, one that doesn’t look at the oil boom or homesteading in North Dakota with rose-colored glasses but one that doesn’t turn away from the uglier parts, and is one that I would definitely recommend.

Pub Date: January 17, 2023

Thank you to Sourcebooks and NetGalley for the review copy.

I expected a lot more information about Anna and not all of the information about the oil industry.
It is well writtenand informative, just not what I expected.

Windfall
by Erika Bolstad
Pub Date: January 17, 2023
Sourcebooks
Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC of this book. Erika Bolstad was shocked to learn she had inherited mineral rights in North Dakota. Determined to unearth the story behind her unexpected inheritance, she followed the trail to her great-grandmother, Anna. But, Bolstad discovers a darker truth about Anna that her family never shared. With journalistic rigor, she unearths a history of environmental exploitation and genocide as well as the modern-day consequences of the Great Plains Dream.
I am glad to see there were discussion questions included because this would be a great book for serious book clubbers.
Not my favorite book of the year. I kind of got bogged down by the facts presented, but good read.
3 stars

Many, many thanks to Sourcebooks for providing an advanced copy of this important story.

I wanted to read this book because of the genealogy mystery which inspired it. Bolstad goes in search of what happened to her great grandmother, family lore being she was a homesteader who married, had a baby, and then disappeared. What really happened is exceedingly tragic, and illustrates the fate of many women in thee 19th century as well as the misogyny which still exists today, albeit more subtle.

But I also found a tale of paradox: the way small communities makes decisions to uplift their living standards, with the price of destroying their environs and contributing to the destruction of the planet via climate change. So this is a story of fossil fuel capturing (and wasting), and what it does to everyone. There's the corporate greed, of course, but more importantly there's the natural human component of eagerness to have a "windfall," and what that windfall becomes.

Bolstad clearly did lots of research, put a lot of miles on her car, and talked to tons of experts in the eight years it took her to write this, all begun with an oil lease and inheritance of a piece of land in North Dakota. The 3 boom/busts of the state are featured, along with what happened to the communities in them, and how human memory is transient, with lessons learned forgotten with another promise of windfall.

It is a necessary story to read, with many questions to answer, and I was glad to see that the published book will include reading guide questions, as this is perfect for a serious book club. For women, our stories could all be Anna's (Bolstad's great grandmother), Bolstad's father's, and even Bolstad herself.

I absolutely loved what she decided to do in the end, and I ached with her as she and her husband pursued pregnancy, with failure after failure. I hope at some point they asked themselves whether they wanted to be pregnant or be parents, because their infertility journey is as tragic as Anna's short life.

HIGHLY HIGHLY RECOMENDED!!!