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Review Of The Perfection Of The Morning: An Apprenticeship In Nature By Sharon Butala, Lisa Knopp

Great Plains Quarterly

"One would hardly have sufficient motive to write an autobiography had not some radical change occurred in his life-conversion, entry into a new life, the operation of Grace," writes theorist Jean Starobinski in his 1980 essay, "Style of Autobiography." The radical change that led to Sharon Butala's transformation occurred in 1976 when, at the age of thirty six, she left the "urban, academic, feminist world" she had known in Saskatoon to marry Peter Butala, a forty-one-year-old bachelor who lived and worked on his family's ranch in extreme southwestern Saskatchewan. Employing the language of conversion, Butala says that her "fateful decision …