Rurally Screwed: My Life Off the Grid with the Cowboy I Love by Jessie Knadler

Release date: 2012 / 336 pages

Synopsis (from Amazon.com): Jessie Knadler was a New York City girl, through and through. An editor for a splashy women’s magazine, she splurged on Miu Miu, partied hard, lived for Kundalini yoga, and dated a man-boy whose complexion was creamier than her own…Then one day, she was assigned a story about an annual rodeo in the badlands of Eastern Montana. There, she met a twenty-five-year-old bull rider named Jake. He voted Republican and read Truck Trader. He listened to Garth Brooks. He owned guns. And Jessie suddenly found herself blindsided by something with which she was painfully unfamiliar: a genuinely lovable disposition…

Review: Most romantic comedies end at the declaration of love and never explore “happily-ever-after.” Rurally Screwed entertains the reader with not only the boy-meets-girl part, but continues well past “I do” and, best of all, is a memoir with a hilarious narrator.

Jessie Knadler never felt comfortable in her home state of Montana; she moved to New York City at seventeen where she spent years writing for women’s magazines, perfecting her kundalini yoga and embracing her destiny as a sardonic, neurotic New Yorker. On assignment for Outdoor Adventure magazine, she returns to Montana to do an article on the Bucking Horse Sale and accidentally meets the love of her life – a man who shed his own hometown of Baltimore in order to become… a cowboy.

Once married, Jessie and Jake decide to move to Lexington, Virginia and are soon knee-deep in chickens, moonshine, and never-ending manual labor. Jessie soon feels lost in her new “identity” and must rediscover her authentic self.

While primarily the story of her love for her husband, Rurally Screwed is also a hero’s journey as Jessie navigates her relationship with various identities – a child from Montana, a woman from New York, a wife in rural Virginia. Her searing wit and unflinching honesty is a pleasure to read; for example, her description of Lululemon-clad yoga fanatics as “what it would look like if Wall Street and reality TV had a baby.” Fans of Ree Drummond’s Pioneer Woman will love Rurally Screwed, as well as anyone who has fallen madly in love with his or her opposite.

Thank you to Shelf Awareness for asking me to read and review this! Interested in a winning a free copy — leave me a comment!