Lost and Broken Things
Winner of the 2026 Spur Award for Best Traditional Western, Linda Sandifer’s novel is both heartwarming and unsentimentally real in its depiction of two forsaken children, old beyond their years, and the community that bolsters them.
In summer 1929, fourteen-year-old Lily Statton and her adoptive brother, Davy, are worried. They’re used to being left alone to herd sheep in Idaho’s Blackfoot Mountains, but it’s been almost two weeks without supplies, and the nearest grocery store is forty miles away in Soda Springs. There’s been no sign of their Ma or her mean second husband, whom they’ve nicknamed Pretty Eddie; they may be dead, for all the children know. For Eddie, this would be no great loss, but they don’t think Ma would’ve left them willingly. Her disappearance echoes through this page-turning story, alongside revelations about who she was. Lily wonders why Ma took on children she didn’t seem to like and whether she was having an affair with a neighboring Basque sheepherder. The situation catches the attention of Sheriff Jack Tanner, who suffers from painful WWI memories and losing his wife and baby to the Spanish Flu, as well as his mother Ellen, a midwife, and her colleague, Dr. Anne Blake.
The viewpoint revolves among multiple characters. Lily’s first-person voice reveals her pride in her self-sufficiency and inner vulnerabilities, which have left her with trust issues. Even those who don’t normally care for child narrators in adult fiction (like this reviewer) should warm to her easily. Ellen and Anne also live with past traumas, and Jack is already preoccupied by reports of murderous bank robbers on the lam. Idaho’s rural backcountry, with its colorful wildflowers dotting the hills and its tangerine skies at sunrise, makes a stunning backdrop for this unexpectedly meaningful Western.
