If you have started Jessie Knadler's Rurally Screwed and have doubts, keep going, it's worth it. The first quarter of the book is slow and even though I am a city girl, I couldn't relate to Knadler. Her behavior and attitude were both irritating. It really wasn't until after she married her cowboy and moved to the country that I began to really like her. By the end of the book, I totally fell in love with Knadler and her family.

This isn't a relationship advice book, but it has a lot of solid advice. At it's core, this is a book about identity and how we perceive ourselves. Knadler wrestles with identifying herself as a city girl and trying to convert to a country girl when she marries. While living in the country, she tries a whole host of activities to acclimate (learning to sew, attending bible study, slaughtering chickens) and eventually has a break down as she feels that she is trying to conform to something that she is not. She often mentions trying to live an "Authentic Life". Knadler is not the only person in the book doing it, nearly everyone is also trying to create what they are supposed to be, through clothes, actions, living situations...all of the time, everywhere, people are busy creating their image of what they feel their life should be. In the meantime, life is happening. All of the effort to "be yourself" is meaningless, because yourself is your day to day and the people that surround you. It's not what you want it to be, but what you already have and it doesn't need to fit into a box. I like how Knadler found an understanding with the women in her bible group, rather than writing them off as being too different to be her friends.

The love letters in the book are beyond sweet. Even though it's bumpy, it's hard not to be envious of the life that Knadler and her cowboy have carved out for themselves.

Great book title, it's what caught my attention in the first place.