Critical Praise

"Lyrical and down-to-earth, wry and heartbreaking, This Life Is In Your Hands is a fascinating and powerful memoir. Melissa Coleman doesn’t just tell the story of her family’s brave experiment and private tragedy; she brings to life an important and underappreciated chapter of our recent history."

—Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher

"A riveting cautionary tale. . . . While the mystery of Heidi’s death is the engine that drives the story, it is Coleman’s clear-eyed portrayal of the wonder and difficulty of living so close to nature that gives the book its power."

—Kimberly Cutter, Marie Claire

"Melissa Coleman takes an unflinching look at her parents, her childhood, and the idealism that both sustained them and led them to tragedy. With beautiful lyrical prose, Coleman shows us what life in a 1970s back to nature farm was like, and the dear price her family paid pursuing their dream."

—Ann Hood, author of The Red Thread and The Knitting Circle

"Intense readability.... haunting power.... as well as lush, vivid atmosphere that is alluring in its own right.... [A] story so nuanced that it would be a disservice to reveal what was in store. If you want to know what happened, read it for yourself."

—Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Rendered with sublimity…. [Coleman] fluently describes the power of the natural world, familial love and heartbreak, grace after loss."

—New York Times Book Review

"Coleman’s moving recounting never loses hope of redemption."

—People, Lead Review "People Pick

"The Colemans and the Nearings . . . worked hard to create an alternative economy that is still growing in rural America. This memoir is evidence of their great sacrifices.<"

——Los Angeles Times

"[This Life Is In Your Hands] is a rare breed of book-a memoir that justifies its own existence; that feels like it needs to exist. What Coleman does so well here is break down a deeply seated myth about giving up the luxuries of city life and returning to the land. . . . Coleman shows that without the essential ingredient of heart, any family-no matter how perfect and revolutionary it seems-is in danger of experiencing real loss."

—NPR.org

"Combine the sincerity of Thoreau’s Walden with the poignancy of Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, add dashes of the lush prose found in Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, and you end up with Melissa Coleman’s This Life is in Your Hands. Set in that era of earnestness and excess, the freewheeling 1970s, Coleman’s story is both an account of her family’s experiment in back-to-the-Garden living and a meditation on a childhood that was simultaneously idyllic, magical, baffling, and tragic. From first to last, I was engaged and deeply moved by this evocative tale of Paradise found then lost."

—Wally Lamb, author of The Hour I First Believed