When the Meadowlark Sings: A Montana Memoir

Born in 1918 in Fort Benton, Montana, Nedra Sterry has crafted a powerful memoir of life on the Montana prairies and a childhood defined in equal measure by poverty and grace, hard work and family ties. The daughter of hailed-out homesteaders, Sterry grew up in a succession of very remote one-room schoolhouses in northern and central Montana, where her mother, a teacher, eked out a living.

Sterry married a wheat farmer and raised five children of her own on the Montana Hi-Line, and she learn...