RaveLos Angeles Review\"The book is a personal, decades-long story of America’s coordinated assault on its underclass ... Heartland also confronts the racial politics of poverty. Where lesser writers might invoke the term \'white trash\' as a badge of honor, Smarsh interrogates her own whiteness, rejecting the term \'white working class\' as divisive and harmful ... In short, because farms are often a go-to setting for Americana, you may think you have read this book before. You haven’t. This is not The Grapes of Wrath or Hillbilly Elegy, and it is never saccharine or self-deluding. This is a tough, no-nonsense woman telling truth, and telling it hard ... The strongest element of Heartland, then, is its unabashed womanliness. At a time of national reckoning about endemic misogyny, Heartland does some serious feminist consciousness raising.”
