What do readers think of Homestead by Melinda Moustakis? Write your own review.

A beautiful story of hardship, resilience, determination, and love set in the hardscrabble land of Alaska just as it becomes a state. A man marries himself to a land he does not know but is determined to wrest a living from, while a girl marries a man she does not know but slowly learns to love. They learn to understand each other and make peace with the past experiences which haunt them. The desciptions are vivid; the hard work of eking out an existence on unforgiving land is both heartbreaking and triumphant. Good read for Kent Haruf fans who like character studies and elegant descriptions of natural life.

Marie and Lawrence are both living with traumas from their pasts but a single day after they meet at a bar in Anchorage they have agreed to marry and homestead on the 150 remote acres Lawrence has claimed. In 1956 Alaska is still a territory and the parcel of land has little to offer other than the lake that caught Lawrence's attention in the government land office.

There is an interesting writing style that invokes the Alaska land—remote and spare—and it is much like the relationship between these characters. Neither of them is a good communicator and they both have difficulty sharing their emotions. Instead they tend to withdraw in silence away from one another. While they retreat from one another the reader is given glimpses behind their protective facades so we care about each of them and their future together.

Lawrence is committed to building a cabin for his family, one that will be big enough for his kids to learn to walk inside.
"He is building this for his children and his children's children — a notion that steadies him, but what of Marie, the everyday of living here with each other, together? How would the days turn into years?"

Homestead is exactly that story.

I really wanted to love this book but I often felt like the author was trying too hard to write great literature to the detriment of just telling a story. The writing was choppy and hard to follow at times; I found the tempo to be very staccato like here: "A testing, a trying, and he reaches the tractor once more. Wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. Dirt in his mouth, and he drinks from his canteen." The short choppy sentences made the reading feel jerky and disjointed. The only character that I really warmed to was Sheila who tried so hard to mother Marie while dealing with her own infertility issues. I did not find either Lawrence or Marie to be particularly likable or sympathetic.

The author wrote this epigraph at the very beginning of her book…."for those who wander". I feel compelled to add the word "blindly" after it. The two characters, Lawrence and Marie, are engaged to marry the day after they met in a bar. Both are running from their traumatic pasts. He from PTSD and she from an unstable upbringing and family life. Not too plausible to launch a story. I really wanted to like this book but I freely admit it left me cold.
I wish the author luck in her career. Her descriptions of the rugged Alaskan landscape were in my estimation the best feature of this book. Choppy writing, in one 16 line, 170 word, sentence makes for choppy reading. This book could use some better editing.

As much as I wanted to like this book I fear that I did not. Where other people read 'artistic prose' I read choppy hard to understand sentences that just felt incomplete in thought. Although by the end of the book I had gotten into the cadence of the writing, that did not mean that I was enjoying it.

Two virtual strangers meet and marry within days. She is looking for belonging, he is looking for children to help on the Alaskan acreage he plans to homestead. One hundred and fifty acres selected from a surveyors map in the 1950's - a wilderness that must be developed. The story is the ups and downs of both homesteading and learning to live with the stranger that you married.

I wanted to like this story of Lawrence and Marie, a newly married couple, strangers to each other, trying to eke out a living on Lawrence's Alaskan homestead. I liked both characters and wanted to know more about their lives, but I really disliked the writing style. I know some reviewers have enjoyed what they called the spare prose but my experience was different. I felt there were so many run-on sentences and an extreme lack of verbs that some of the sentences were very confusing. This diluted my enjoyment of the story.