In an author interview that was included in my audiobook download, the author characterizes this book as a memoir. I hadn't thought of it that way, but since she obviously did, her choices of what to include and what to leave out do make a bit more sense to me, since it's her life experiences she's recalling. I found the book quite unfocused, with much less time given to the actual story of the author's search for information about her grandmother (whom she'd never known) than I'd hoped for. In that same interview, the author comments that Anna, her grandmother, is actually included in every chapter, if only in a single sentence. I suppose that's true, but I'd have estimated that Anna's story comprised only about ten percent of this memoir. The bulk of the book was devoted to details about the oil industry (financial corruption, bending or ignoring regulations, environmental impact, racial inequity, etc.), all of which was interesting, but not what the book's subtitle led me to expect. The author also wrote often about her own struggles with infertility, her journalistic ambitions and other reporting projects, and social justice issues that were much in the news during the time she was writing this book. In the last couple of hours of listening, I found myself speeding up the audiobook's narration just to get to the end.

This is an interesting read. I like that it is a woman trying to find out more about her family as well as finding things about herself. She also talks about the pipeline and how it can be hard to see that fracking can have some negative effects on the planet. The main portion of the book is based in North Dakota. Honestly, I feel that it is almost like a finding of herself as well as finding out about her great-grandmother. This book does open your eyes to some things such as medical treatment of women in the earlier times. This book is a good book, but some parts just weren't for me.