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Plainsong by Kent Haruf

For a book touted on the cover as "so delicate and lovely..." Plainsong certainly had a lot of detailed and graphic descriptions, including: exactly how to check if a cow is pregnant, a high school girl's first OBGYN visit, a calf's premature birth and a horse autopsy. I'm just a queasy reader I guess. I squinted my eyes through those parts and the rest of the book was nice -- a leisurely paced, melancholy but uplifting story in a small Western town. It has no plot twists, which in itself is sort of a plot twist because I kept thinking I saw them coming. The book also does not have one of those crushingly tragic endings which seem so common in award winning novels -- I guess that explains why this was only a finalist for the National Book Award.