While drawn from her own experiences growing up in North Dakota and migrating west during the Dust Bowl Diaspora, these stories are beautifully imagined and exquisitely rendered. Hudson was well ahead of her time in the ways in which she blends reality and imagination and in so doing blurs the boundaries of each in ways that would become common practice among writers in the generations following her. Her characters seem so real precisely because they are so perfectly crafted. Hudson's experience certainly colors their world and shapes their character but they come fully and vividly alive only through the power of her art.