"In Almanac, Christine Gelineau draws from a particular life, her own, different than mine or yours, but the differences fade to the margins of consciousness in the deeply felt connection she establishes with the reader. It's a connection based on her fidelity to what is, to the real feel of our living. She helps us hear the heartbeat under the noise, hers and ours. And the heartbeat of the horses that have accompanied her on her journey. Her love of horses opens on a love of the world and is the source of the many beauties of this book, and of the profound solace it provides." -- Kevin Oderman, author of How Things Fit Together: Fifteen Essays, winner of the Bakeless Prize in Nonfiction
"Personal, historical, philosophical, meticulously researched, Almanac weaves a mosaic of the changing seasons of a woman's life, the changing seasons on a farm, the changing awareness of our collective history, and the alarming changes we've wrought on our planet. I was grateful for Gelineau's intelligence and her prose that sings like poetry. But mostly I was grateful for the way she touched my heart again and again. I did not want this book to end." -- Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys
"I read Christine Gelineau's Almanac at a single sitting, enthralled by a book at once so capacious and so grounded, so intimate and so wise. Gelineau gets that 'history--personal, national, global, cosmic--is an artifact' made of language, and she registers history here at all those scales in finely honed, pitch-perfect language, but she also recognizes that nature 'is outside of language, ineluctably real, ' and the birth of a foal in a cold April barn is as present here as challenges in her childhood and the colonial complications of the Americas and emergency brain surgery and climate catastrophe. Horses and humans alike take pleasure, Gelineau observes, in the 'sensation of meaning and order.' Art, she says, can offer that sensation. Her book, I say, does offer it." -- H. L. Hix, author of over thirty books, including Chromatic, a finalist for the National Book Award