Book: Crazy Mountain

For decades, Elise Atchison has made an off-grid home outside Livingston her basecamp for a self-taught education in natural history. She uses her keen eye for animal sign—a snowy paw-print here, a clump of feathers there—to sketch vignettes about the creatures in her midst. In Crazy Mountain (Sowilo Press, $23), Atchison focuses that curiosity on a beloved—and coveted—mountain that presides over the fictional town of Granite. In her High Plains Book Award–winning novel, Atchison follows a dozen characters who shape the mountain with an increasingly heavy hand over a nearly 50-year period. Atchison invites readers to contemplate what happens to a once-wild, once-intact landscape when it has been carved up, paved over, and fenced in. Spoiler alert: it’s not just the views that are compromised. Unrestrained growth also has implications for the wildlife in our midst, and for the type of connections that can knit a town into something more: a community.