FROM THE BOOK JACKET

"Ellen Meloy is our raven here---funny, joyous, great-hearted---a brilliant storyteller. Raven's Exile is as good as it could be, a book to be celebrated, and its own celebration. They say a country gets the books it deserves, and the West is getting some beauties." -- William Kittredge

"Ellen Meloy's book arrives in the nick of time when what we need in the midst of all this talk about the 'New West' is a good river trip. Raven's Exile is an exuberant, smart, irreverent, and loving account of one woman bearing witness in Desolation Canyon." -- Terry Tempest Williams

"In Raven's Exile, Ellen Meloy shows a keen and hilarious regard for her chosen life: a raft-borne vigil on the Green River. Hands on the oars, we float with her and husband Mark through a ranger's year, down boiling rapids and over glassy calms, finding good camps and bad.
    Her descriptions of Desolation Canyon are lyrical and slightly crazed, perfectly tuned to the heat and remoteness, while her vision of the surrounding West is lit with ironic gleams.
    Again and again, I found myself admiring this book for its candor, wit, and curious grace. Meloy is no literary tourist, no headhunter-with-a-book-advance: her essays and cartoons have lightened Western hearts---or at least those half-broken ones like mine---for years.
    And with Raven's Exile, she joins a bright and weathered company---Mary Austin, Ed Abbey, William Kittredge, and Ann Zwinger---in the defense of a misconstrued landscape, and in pursuit of its unspoken truth." -- C.L. Rawlins