Louise Halsey has reviewed Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods for the Fort Smith Historical Society Journal:
“Twenty Acres is a sensitive, thoughtful, honest book full of details that give this period in the author’s life solidity. … Her book is a gift that shows how her ‘back to the land’ experience unfolded and what was gained or lost as a result. If you are interested in this period and the folks who sought a way of living that was more sustainable (before the term became commonplace), then this is worthwhile. The writing is clear, shorn of cliches and her voice is kind, showing compassion over judgment.”
—Louise Halsey, Fort Smith Historical Society Journal, October 2023
And Amy Wang has reviewed the book on her Substack, Bookworm:
It wasn’t that Sarah Neidhardt’s parents didn’t have money. It was that they got swept up in the 1970s countercultural, back-to-the-land movement that painted what she calls “some archetypal, pre-industrial past” as the best way to live. So in 1973, despite the misgivings voiced by their upper-class families in South Carolina and Colorado, the young couple and their baby, Sarah, moved to the Arkansas Ozarks, where they would spend the next eight years living hand to mouth while raising Sarah and her two younger sisters.
Sarah Neidhardt was an infant when her parents joined the growing back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. Uprooting their young family to move from Colorado Springs to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, they built a cabin, grew their own food, and for years strove to escape their former lives and achieve an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency.
In Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods, bohemian counterculture meets pioneer homemaking. Neidhardt revisits her childhood with compassion and candor, drawing upon a trove of family letters to retrace her parents’ journey from their affluent youths, to their embrace of rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society. As she comes to better understand her family and the movement that shaped them, Neidhardt reveals both the treasures and tolls of an unconventional, pastoral life.