In Appraisals, Claire Boyles’ debut novel, financial and ecological realities tear at the heart of a multigenerational farm family.
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About Appraisals
Maggie Brandt, a third-generation farmer, is cultivating a few acres of organic vegetables in rural Colorado—a place where industrial farming reigns supreme—when the Great Recession hits. After months of unemployment, her husband, Fish, takes a job with an oil and gas company, a decision that threatens their once happy marriage and alienates their teenage daughter, Ozzie, a budding environmental crusader. As the wider community organizes against a billionaire outsider who is buying farmland and, more worryingly, water rights in the moisture-starved county, Maggie’s grandmother Flora grapples with the painful echoes of her own past.
Flora and Ozzie’s already close bond deepens as they join a local activist group, but Fish and Maggie’s conflicting approaches to surviving circumstances that are out of their control drive them further apart. Faced with intolerable layers of loss, each member of the family is forced to consider what they are willing to compromise and what they are, or are not, able to forgive.
At once tender and urgent, Appraisals is a moving portrayal of ecological and financial catastrophe, the powerful generational bonds between women, and the fierce impulse to protect the places we love.
Praise for Appraisals
“Appraisals is a fierce, elegiac portrait of people trying to remain morally intact while the world they love is being depleted.”—Bill Kelly – Booklist
“Boyles shines in her studied descriptions of agricultural life, and her depictions of the 2008 recession dovetail with the current farm crisis. Readers will find much to admire.”—Publishers Weekly
“A masterful picture of endurance and loyalty, all with a social conscience. Sensitive to the nuances of class, Claire Boyles’s keen eye asks us to reexamine our relationships to land and legacy and to home and place…This novel has a rough-edged beauty that will knock you out.”—Nina McConigley, author of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder
“An achingly believable story about land, love, and heartbreaking choices, written by one of the best chroniclers of the contemporary American West.”—Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
“In this gorgeous debut novel, Claire Boyles writes about the West and generations of women who work small farms there. Appraisals is not only mesmerizing and honest, it feels necessary for the times we are living in.”—Ann Hood, author of The Stolen Child
“Appraisals is as rich and thick with life as freshly turned soil. It is about home and what grows there, both with ease and with effort. It is full of grit and fear and faith, and I loved it so much.”—Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal
“At once luminous, heartbreaking, and joyous, Appraisals is a gripping novel about a woman-led organic farm in oil and gas country. Drawn from true-life stories of economic oppression in rural America, this is a book for anyone who loves fresh vegetables and fruits, wants to prevent environmental collapse, and cares about family farmers.”—Sarah Vogel, author of The Farmer’s Lawyer
“Appraisals is a beautiful book, wise in the knowledge of the riches of country.…The land, the farm, and the family are all part of this lovely novel, which tracks the life of four generations in one magnificent place.”—Roxana Robinson, author of Leaving
About Claire Boyles, Author of Appraisals
Claire Boyles is a writer and former farmer. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of Appraisals and Site Fidelity, which won the High Plains Book Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Reading the West Award.
Her nonfiction has appeared in Sierra Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals, and she is a screenwriter with multiple credits on the Hallmark Channel. She splits time between Loveland, Colorado and Ames, Iowa, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and the Environment at Iowa State University.
You can engage with Claire Boyles on her website, as well as on Instagram and X (though we include Claire Boyles’ link to this social media account, LitStack does not endorse the site, nor does it encourage you to visit the site).
Source: Publisher
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN Hardcover 9780393531800
Pub Date: Aug 4, 2026
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