BOOTSTRAPPER

BOOTSTRAPPER is an inspiring, poignant, and laugh-out-loud funny memoir about chicken wrangling, church shopping, zucchini farming, and family.

Mardi met Mr. Wonderful when she was only 19; more than two decades later, as an adult single woman, she wasn't looking for that one good man, but rather trying to raise three good men. Her personal story of financial hardship and triumph is tightly wrapped within America's own economic meltdown. With the help of a pellet gun, an axe, a stolen disco ball, and a Christmas dinner of hot dogs roasted on a campfire in their own woods, she tells the heartfelt story of one plucky heroine, her equally heroic sons and their sheer nerve and determination to make it through thick and thin. When Mardi Link finally told her pot-smoking, layabout husband of two decades to get out of the house, he left, but he sure didn't go far. "Mr. Wonderful," as Mardi's girlfriends had nicknamed him, moved into a rented house directly across the street, leaving her to raise their three sons alone, despite his close proximity. Having given up her career as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor to stay home with their boys, Mardi was an unemployed stay-at-home mother in a remote part of northern Michigan, trying her hand at hobby farming when she divorced. Determined to hold on to the only home her children had ever known - a drafty, century-old farmhouse on six acres - the one time "hobby" farm now had to feed a family of four and sustain twelve chickens, one rooster, two horses, two dogs, two cats, and one piglet. One of Michigan's notorious winters was bearing down on them, there was an impending bank foreclosure on the farm, and Mardi was beginning to worry about their mortal and, yes, heathen souls. How was she ever going to keep the four of them warm, stave off the bank, feed their bodies and their souls all alone? Not by getting a job - Michigan had 18% unemployment. Not by telling her rich parents that she now had to return soda cans for grocery money; they would never understand. The family would do it by working together.