Mardi Jo LinkCritiques

2023 book #64. 2013. A memoir of a single mom with 3 boys and how they survived the first year after her marriage ended. On a small Michigan farm no less. Humorous and heartwarming. Read for a book club.

Good writer, and a well told memoir of a hard period in her life. A reminder that poverty is always much closer than we think, and what that looks like from the inside. Vaguely annoying, in that I wanted her to succeed without the new love of my life marriage thing, but a good read for all of that.

Longwinded in need of a better editor. Chapters completely irrelevant to the story. A whole chapter about a book club many decades later that had Shirley not been murdered she may or may not have wanted to have been a member of. Another chapter on the history of the area. Save time and find an article online would be my advice.

A cute, humorous look at a year in the life of a single mom , raising 3 boys on a Northern Michigan farm. Although this is billed as bio/memoir it's really not that at all. As I said, it just covers the one year, which is the year she left her husband. Said husband moved across the road. She refers to the husband as Mr. Wonderful (sarcastically) through-out.

The writing was not great, most of the stories were humorous, but a few times she irked me with the "poor me" attitude. All things considered, it deserves the 3 stars for the times it made me laugh or smile.

This is a well researched true crime fiction piece about the murder of a nun in Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula in the early 1900's. I came across this title in an alumni newsletter from University of Detroit Mercy for an alumni book group. The setting is a community of Polish settlers in what was then a remote area claimed as farmland from wilderness.

Sister Mary Janina disappeared on an August afternoon while the parish priest was out on a fishing expedition with his sister. His housekeeper, her daughter, and two other nuns were left behind. All three nuns were suffering from TB and took daily afternoon naps. Upon rising from their naps, they discovered that Sister Janina was gone. Extensive searches produced nothing. Two priests and 14 years later, her remains were discovered in the basement of the church when the new priest had ambitions of building a new church.

The rest of the book covers the investigation, trial, and the subsequent facts of the case.
It is well written and compelling reading and would probably be of special interest for those who enjoy Michigan history

Started strong but didn't pay off. Fully agree with Ella_Jill below. Very little homesteading inspo. Almost nothing on her journey to badassery, other than she became broke (due largely to her own choices and some bad luck) and over time became less so.½

This was a very, very good retelling of the mysterious full family murder of the Robinson's.

[a:Mardi Jo Link|6550474|Mardi Jo Link|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1352554498p2/6550474.jpg] meticulously goes through all of the evidence in the case, considering each of the theories that came up regarding who might have done it. She relies greatly on primary evidence, turning to secondary only when it's not available. She keeps her notes clear, and keeps herself largely outside of the story. By the end of the book I had drawn my own conclusions, and was genuinely curious whether or not anything new would ever come forth.

My only complaint about the book is the very ending, when she goes back to describing Good Hart and it's current demeanor rather than ending it with the final evidence of the murder. It did serve to lighten the mood, yes, and to show how thoroughly Good Hart was affected by what happened. Still, it would have served better during the initial description of the town rather than being part of the epilogue itself.

BOOTSTRAPPER is not at all what I'd expected. Its better. A helluva lot better, in fact, and, if I could talk with author Mardi Jo Link, I'd apologize for my misplaced and wrongheaded expectations. Because I expected more man-bashing, more complaining, more whining about the unfairness of life, etc. Nope, if any of those things are here, they are overshadowed by this woman's grit, guts and sheer determination to overcome her reduced circumstances brought about by divorce and make a decent life for herself and her three sons. Her way of coping is the personification of that old expression about "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps." Hence the title. And through it all she also tries to take her dad's advice to "keep your dobber up," while admitting she's not quite sure what a 'dobber' is. And it doesn't hurt that she's got three fine sons who are helpful and don't complain much about being suddenly poor when their parents divorce after nineteen years of marriage. And the stories of makeshift farming are funny and familiar. I too once had to deal with a nasty rooster, back when I was 10-12 years old, until my Grandpa showed me how to drop kick the ornery bastard clear across the chicken coop.

BOOTSTRAPPED is often hilarious, but it is also a very moving look at a family that pulls together to survive some pretty hard times. Mardi Jo Link is an extremely talented writer who has told her story with humor and heart. This is a great book. I loved it.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

I picked up this book out of curiosity about how this Michigan author would depict northern Michigan, especially Drummond Island. The story promised to share a story about close knit group of women and their experiences on an annual retreat to the island.
I was somewhat disappointed. The chapters are written as a series of anecdotes that become jokes or punchlines that define their connections to one another and the island. This makes them seem somewhat coarse, superficial, and somewhat repetitive. Although the words say that these women have deep regard for the land, especially on the island. Their actions suggest a disregard for the ecology of that same island.....4 wheeling over mud tracks and tromping over the alvar at Maxton Plains.
it was a quick read, but I was hoping for more depth.½

Mardi Jo Link is divorced, broke, cold, and hungry. She's trying to hang on to her three sons, her horses, her house, and her land. What sounds like a tragedy, plays out as a surprisingly uplifting tale of surviving -- thriving -- in Northern Michigan.

Told in vignettes loosely follow a calendar year the author includes many details of living and working on a small-time farm...for this reader, the most interesting parts of the book. Others will relate to her trials facing a divorce and raising three sons to be good citizens.

A woman with three sons is getting divorced from their father after almost 20 years. All she has is the farmhouse and the land in northern Michigan. This is the true story of how she fed and clothed everyone for the first year, by growing vegetables and being resourceful. I admire her strength, her ability to get things done when there didn't seem to be a solution in sight. She didn't make the best choices every time, but no one does. I was disappointed that she couldn't handle the chickens when it came time.

This book, the autobiographical story of a single mother with a dream, started a little slow, but became increasingly engaging. The author conveyed the sense of desperation she felt at times, the feelings of shame and degradation which she combatted with the pride of independence and survival, and the love of her three boys very well. It is not a unique story, yet a story well told.

This woman writes as well as Cheryl Stayed without ever leaving home.

If you are looking for a book to inspire you to move on with your life after a bad relationship, this is also a great choice. Ms. Link's opening scene concerning the ritual burning of her wedding dress was inspiring.

This book was a mixed bag for me. It’s well-written and interesting, and the author has an excellent sense of humor, but it’s not the kind of book I expected it to be, judging from its title and description. For one thing, it’s not so much about farming, as about the author’s attempts to pull her life together emotionally and fiscally after her divorce from her husband of 19 years, after she came home late from work to find him smoking an unspecified illegal substance in the garage. For another thing, it’s not about a commercial farm. Link grew vegetables on it to feed her family, but she didn’t produce anything for sale there. Her income came entirely from freelance writing (she’s a journalist by profession) and an unspecified outside job. She does mention ordering seeds from a catalog and planting. That year she also bought some chickens, but soon the meat chickens chased the egg chickens out of the coop and began terrorizing the author’s sons aged 9, 13, and 16 – a situation Link apparently was unable to do anything about. She also realized that she couldn’t bring herself to kill the meat chickens. She couldn’t find anyone to do the deed for her either, and so she ran an ad in the local paper, offering live meat chicken for free to whoever would pick them up from her property. She refers to the guy who showed up as her savior and to his family as angels. The egg chickens remained and finally started producing eggs, but she admits that she spent more money on the chickens than she had spent on fresh eggs from other people’s farms before. Then again, she herself admits that she’s no financial genius. To wit, she re-mortgaged her farm, using the funds her grandfather had left to her sons for college as collateral, only to realize the next day that she couldn’t afford to pay this mortgage. So she sold part of the land instead to keep the other part and the house and to bring in some cash to pay off debts. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I don’t see anything in it to write a book about either.

Much of the book is devoted to describing the family’s financial problems. When it was time to buy firewood, Link drove her sons around the countryside, collecting the logs that had fallen from other people’s pickups. When they had hit a wild turkey, she asked her sons to try to find it, not to nurse it to health, as she’d have done in happier days, but to kill it for food, because she hadn’t been able to buy anything other than eggs for months. Part of their poverty stemmed from the fact that she had waived off most of the child support her ex-husband should have been paying, afraid that otherwise he’d ask to share the kids on a week-on, week-off basis, as was common for divorced couples in their area. I can easily sympathize with her that she didn’t want to give up having her kids with her full-time – gone are the days when a divorced woman could at least count on keeping her children and having their father pay adequate child support. However, she writes that she was also too proud to ask her parents for help or to apply to any of the half-dozen state programs she was qualified for, except for free school lunches. Now, if she were alone, this would have been her own business, but considering that she had three kids living with her, I couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t very responsible of her. What amazed me throughout this book was how uncomplainingly her sons apparently put up with all this. In an age when adolescents throw fits when they don’t get electronic gargets and fashionable outfits of their choice, it’s certainly refreshing, not to mention astonishing, to read about kids who don’t complain when they have to walk around the house wrapped in blankets and eat hot dogs for Christmas dinner (forget about the presents). And it’s not like they hadn’t known anything better. The author’s parents, both schoolteachers, had paid for her journalism school and certainly kept a warm, food-laden house. So when Link writes of her pride in her sons, I can totally see her point, but when she says that she’s proud of herself because she’s managed to hold on to her farm and her kids, I can’t quite share her sentiments. I mean I agree that she did the right thing in both keeping the farm and keeping the kids, but I don’t think there’s much reason for pride in how she did it – or for writing a book.

However, despite the subject matter, it’s not a sad book, and it’s actually often funny, probably because she wrote it five years later, when she’d remarried and published two successful books about local murders and could probably look back on her post-divorce tribulations with a humorous eye.

Bootstrapper, Mardi Jo Link’s new memoir, threw me a bit of a curve. The book’s subtitle reads this way: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm, leading me to believe that its focus was on the difficulty of eking out a living from one of today’s small American farms – a topic that intrigues me, especially as seen from the female point-of-view. Instead, Bootstrapper is more the story of one woman’s struggle to survive the breakup of her marriage to a Weak Ass from Northern Michigan – a much more common and less intriguing topic.

Link’s husband, when the couple first split up, moved only a few hundred feet away from the mortgaged acreage and family home in which Mardi Jo continued to live with her three sons. This made it easy for Mardi Jo and her soon-to-be ex-husband to hand the boys off so that they could spend time with each parent. But Mr. Ex, for the most part, was surprisingly invisible even as, just across the road from his new place, it should have been obvious that Mardi Jo and her boys were struggling to put food on the table.

Mardi Jo, though, saw life on the family farm as “living the dream” and refused to give it up even when she and the boys were largely living on peanut butter and the free bakery goods they won in a zucchini-growing contest. She had one huge problem: she really knew very little about growing her own food, raising the meat that would sustain her family over the long Michigan winter, or keeping the chickens that would supply the family with fresh eggs. Eventually, she learned these things, but she learned them the hard way.

The best thing about Bootstrapper is meeting Mardi Jo’s three sons, each of whom seems to have a unique personality and a different set of life-skills that combine perfectly to help their mother keep things together just long enough for the family to survive their near-disastrous first year of single-parenthood. Mardi Jo, determined to save her farm despite the numerous sacrifices this will require from her and her children, is lucky to have these boys.

Bottom Line: Bootstrapper is an interesting memoir about a woman who, despite the tremendous odds stacked against her, refuses to give up her dream of living on the family farm. Regardless of its subtitle, however, this is a book about a writer who happens to live on a farm; it is not a book about small-time farming in the twenty-first century.

Bootstrapper: to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance --- Merriam-Webster dictionary.



Mardi Jo Link is living the life she always dreamed of - three amazing young sons and the opportunity to raise them in the countryside in a beautiful old farmhouse sitting on six acres. And yes, there was a husband too - but with divorce now a certainty, Mardi Jo is determined to hang onto her sons, her house and her land - by herself.

"I'm claiming my sons, the farm, the debt, the other debt, the horses, the dogs, and the land. I'm claiming our century-old farmhouse, the garden, the woods, the pasture, the barn, and the Quonset-hut garage. They're all mine now, and this is how I will raise my boys: on cheerful summer days and well water and BB guns and horseback riding and dirt. Because I'm claiming our whole country life, the one I've been dreaming of and planning out and working for since I was a little girl."

And this is where the bootstrapping comes into play -for Link is working with next to nothing in the way of finances. And wants to do it on her own - "I made this bed and I'll either lie in it or die in it, but I won't ask anyone for help."

Mardi Jo details the physical ups and downs - the day to day business of providing, but Bootstrapper also reads like a personal diary with Link's hopes, dreams, triumphs, losses and more laid bare. But what shone through the brightest was the love for her sons. These are the passages that stayed with me the longest. There are struggles, but the love and support they feel for each other is tangible. And quite humorous at times.

""Boys," I announced, "we're going to raise some chickens."
"Another pet to play with!" said Will, the idealist.
"Another kind of poop to clean up, said Luke, the worker.
"Another animal in bondage," said Owen, the activist."

I couldn't put Bootstrapper down - I was cheering Mardi Jo on with every chapter. And I empathized - we too bought an old farmhouse and there were some mighty lean years in the beginning - and there were two of us. I loved the descriptions of her garden - I too have grown our own vegetables for many, many years. Seed catalogues are exciting.

And at the end of the year is there a happy ever after ending? I'll let you discover that for yourself.

Bootstrapper is a one sitting read, one I enjoyed for its honesty. These are the memoirs I like to read - real people, real life. And she sounds like the kind of person I'd like to visit with on the porch.

I got this book free at ALA Midwinter.

I'm from Ohio (thisclose to Michigan) and Link's voice sounded so familiar to me that I was immediately drawn in to her memoir of divorce and reinvention. I could identify deeply with much of it. Being a single mom is hard. Being a poor single mom with no steady income is harder still. Link makes her story sing. One roots for her and the boys the whole way through. There are hilarious bits, and others that like to tore out my heart. Over the course of this short book (I read it in one sitting) I grew to know and care deeply about her whole family. Recommended.

Spoilers? Can there be a spoiler in a true crime book? I guess it keeps you reading when you don't know how the trial will end. We're doing a book program. I guess this book does need to be promoted. Anyway, it is the story of the murder of a nun in Northern Michigan in the early part of the 20th century, and the discovery of the bones & trial of the housekeeper 14 years later. It is well written & interesting to read.

Starts well, finishes poorly. Link includes many anecdotal stories that really lead nowhere. Ultimately, the last seven chapters seem like padding, perhaps intended as a coda to the main story, but ultimately weak.

I spotted this gem of a true-life crime novel one day while surfing on Amazon. For anyone who is a fan of true crime novels or cold case books this is a great choice.

This is an accounting of an unsolved murder that took place 40 years ago in Good Hart, Michigan. It's about the murders of a wealthy Detroit family vactioning in Good Hart in 1968. It was the American dream at the time, to escape the city and be able to spend the summer on the shore, and instead turned into a mystery. Dick and Shirley Robison and their 3 teen age boys and young daughter were found in July of 1968 murdered in their cabin. The story we're told is based on newspaper accounts, court documents and interviews with the people involved. What at first looks like your typical American family is quickly discovered to be full of even more mystery that confused authorites and made the crime impossible to solve. This writing in this book is wonderful and keeps you riveted. It's hard hitting and factual, and yet involves the reader in the last days of this families lives in a way that is anything but dry. This is a book I'd recommend to all fans of mystery and whodunits.

3.5

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