This Life Is in Your Hands
One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone
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Narrated by:
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Melissa Coleman
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By:
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Melissa Coleman
About this listen
Set on a rugged coastal homestead during the 1970s, This Life Is in Your Hands introduces a superb young writer driven by the need to uncover the truth of a childhood tragedy and connect anew with the beauty and vitality of the back-to-the-land ideal that shaped her early years.
In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman's parents, Eliot and Sue - a handsome, idealistic young couple from well-to-do families - pack a few essentials into their VW truck and abandon the complications of modern reality to carve a farm from the woods. They move to a remote peninsula on the coast of Maine and become disciples of Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life. On 60 acres of sandy, intractable land, Eliot and Sue begin to forge a new existence, subsisting on the crops they grow and building a home with their own hands.
While they establish a happy family and achieve their visionary goals, the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes at a price. Winters are long and lean, summers frenetic with the work of the harvest, and the distraction of the many young farm apprentices threatens the Colemans' marriage. Then, one summer day when Melissa is seven, her three-year-old sister, Heidi, wanders off and drowns in the pond where she liked to play. In the wake of the accident, ideals give way to human frailty, divorce, and a mother's breakdown - and ultimately young Melissa is abandoned to the care of neighbors.
What really happened, and who, if anyone, is to blame? This Life Is in Your Hands is the search to understand a complicated past; a true story, both tragic and redemptive, it tells of the quest to make a good life, the role of fate, and the power of forgiveness.
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When Brunella Cartolano visits her father on the family vineyard in the basin of the Cascade Mountains, she's shocked by the devastation caused by a four-year drought. Passionate about the Pacific Northwest ecology, Brunella, a cultural impact analyst, is embroiled in a battle to save the Seattle waterfront from redevelopment and to preserve a fisherman's livelihood. But when a tragedy among fire-jumpers results from a failure of the water supply - her brother Niccolo is among those lost - Brunella finds herself with another mission.
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Obviously Not Read By A Washington Resident
- By John C Schuyler on 04-24-19
By: Timothy Egan
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Good Poems
- Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
- By: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and others
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Abridged
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Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence.
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Very good, but. . .
- By KSmith on 01-27-11
By: Emily Dickinson, and others
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The Child Finder
- A Novel
- By: Rene Denfeld
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Three years ago, Madison Culver disappeared when her family was choosing a Christmas tree in Oregon's Skookum National Forest. She would be eight years old now - if she has survived. Desperate to find their beloved daughter, certain someone took her, the Culvers turn to Naomi, a private investigator with an uncanny talent for locating the lost and missing. Known to the police and a select group of parents as "the Child Finder", Naomi is their last hope.
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One Dimensional
- By Sara on 10-04-17
By: Rene Denfeld
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Without a Map
- A Memoir
- By: Meredith Hall
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.
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Not Your Average "16 and Pregnant"
- By Susie on 12-11-12
By: Meredith Hall
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Once Upon a River
- By: Bonnie Jo Campbell
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a rising star in contemporary fiction. Hailed by Booklist as a female Huckleberry Finn, Campbell’s heroine is 16yearold Margo Crane. Complicit in her father’s death, Margo flees home for the Stark River. And as she follows the current, she learns the ways of the world from the eccentric characters she meets.
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Great Narrator - Horrific story
- By J. Kromrie on 11-04-20
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All the Winters After
- A Novel
- By: Seré Prince Halverson
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Kachemak Winkel never intended to come back to his hometown of Caboose, Alaska, where his family died in a plane crash 20 years earlier. When he finally musters the courage to return and face his painful memories, he's surprised to find a mysterious young woman living in his abandoned house.
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The Old Old Story
- By Bruce on 06-16-16
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I Will Send Rain
- A Novel
- By: Rae Meadows
- Narrated by: Emily Sutton-Smith
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, and in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934, and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma, is struggling as the earliest storms of the Dust Bowl descend. The wheat harvests are drying out, and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains.
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We've seen pictures of the Dust Bowl
- By Henwhisperer on 10-12-16
By: Rae Meadows
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The Song Poet
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Kao Kalia Yang
- Narrated by: Kao Kalia Yang
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until one day a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good.
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Beautiful, full of sadness, power, and heart.
- By Melissa L. Magana on 04-27-17
By: Kao Kalia Yang
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The Magic of Ordinary Days
- A Novel
- By: Ann Howard Creel
- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Olivia Dunne, a studious minister's daughter who dreams of being an archaeologist, never thought that the drama of World War II would affect her quiet life in Denver. An exhilarating flirtation reshapes her life, though, and she finds herself banished to a rural Colorado outpost, married to a man she hardly knows. Overwhelmed by loneliness, Olivia tentatively tries to establish a new life, finding much-needed friendship and solace in two Japanese American sisters who are living at a nearby internment camp.
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I purchased this audio book not 15 minutes ago...
- By Kim on 09-15-16
By: Ann Howard Creel
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Jagannath
- By: Karin Tidbeck
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 4 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A child is born in a tin can. A switchboard operator finds himself in hell. Three corpulent women float somewhere beyond time. Welcome to the weird world of Karin Tidbeck, the visionary Swedish author of literary sci-fi, speculative fiction, and mind-bending fantasy who has captivated fans around the world. Originally published by the tiny press Cheeky Frawg - the passion project of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer - Jagannath has been celebrated by listeners and critics alike, with rave reviews from major outlets and support from lauded peers like China Mieville and even Ursula K. Le Guin herself.
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Always unique, usually quite good, sometimes meh
- By Eugene on 02-13-19
By: Karin Tidbeck
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The Saturdays
- By: Elizabeth Enright
- Narrated by: Pamela Dillman
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The four Melendy children live with their father and Cuffy, their beloved housekeeper, in a worn but comfortable brownstone in New York City. There's thirteen-year-old Mona, who has decided to become an actress; twelve-year-old mischievous Rush; ten-year-old Randy who loves to dance and paint; and thoughtful Oliver, who is just six-years-old.
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Excellent for children and adults
- By Dale on 05-15-04
What listeners say about This Life Is in Your Hands
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kelley
- 04-26-12
Heartbreaking but courageous story
If you could sum up This Life Is in Your Hands in three words, what would they be?
family, honest, heartbreaking
What was one of the most memorable moments of This Life Is in Your Hands?
The visions painted of children playing carefree on summer days in rugged Maine.
What about Melissa Coleman’s performance did you like?
It's her story... she lived it, earned the right to write about it, and earned the right to narrate it for us. I can't even imagine the feelings she had while not only writing the book, but then also recording the audio version. I can only hope that she found some peace within the process. To hear it told by anyone else would have felt "false".
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
It did make me cry! Not so much the actual story of when the inevitable event happened, but more about how each family member dealt with it afterwards.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-28-23
Great viewpoint
I loved the angle this story was told from. As a child watching a family be undone but a movement take form in her father’s psyche. I have built my farm on Eliot’s books and advice and enjoyed hearing how the early years of Four Season Farm molded the present years.
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- Someone Else
- 04-02-20
Beautifully told sadness
Beautifully told memoir of a quiet tragedy. The author’s narration really took me into the story.
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- Rosanna L. Diggs
- 03-24-19
So sad
This is probably the saddest story I’ve ever read. Gut wrenching, real. Thank you, Mrs. Coleman for sharing a very hard, very personal story with us. As the mother of a precocious toddler, the daughter of a woman who walked away, and a person who wants to farm, this registered on several levels.
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- L. Miller
- 04-17-15
Why do authors have to read their own books?
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
I would only recommend that someone read this book, not listen.
How could the performance have been better?
Is it just plain arrogance? Is it a control thing? Why, oh why do authors insist on reading their own books? This book could have been fantastic, with its gorgeous prose and characters who came alive. But the author deciding to reading the book herself was a horrible mistake. The phrasing is off, the author's voice gets gravelly, and it turns out just plain annoying.
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1 person found this helpful
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- cbr
- 07-02-17
The author's voice gently tells a difficult story.
Some of this book is hard to hea as a mother but the story is woven extremely well.
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Overall
- Anne
- 04-30-11
The worst reader ever
Normally I like to hear an author read a book if they can speak clearly -- this woman has a voice which is both squeaky and scratchy at the same time. Plus she sounds like a little girl reading words which are too big for her -- It is excruciating listening. I am going to forfeit the 21 dollars I just spent and get it from the library to read because it might be a good book I couldn't get past the first 20 minutes.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Pamela Harvey
- 08-24-11
Not as advertised
This reads more like a documentary on organic farming, narrated by a child, and was nowhere near as interesting as the publisher's description. The details drone on and on, without nuance or layers of perception, feelings, character development, and the critical event takes place only at the end of the book. A "Family Undone"? Sounded like things barely registered on the characters' emotional Richter scale. If I could give this zero stars I would.
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6 people found this helpful