Introduction by Judy Blunt
Afterword by Nancy S. Cook
 
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Ignored when first published, No More Giants is now recognized as a classic work about women in the American West. It's a gripping story of a young woman growing up in the harsh setting of a Nevada ranch in the 1940s. It combines a deep love for the land with a  bracingly honest view of family conflicts and the loss of dreams. Jenny struggles to survive and escape from the frustrations and hatred of her parents, recounting the  hardships and joys of life in a stark and unforgiving  landscape.

Raised on a Nevada ranch herself, Joaquina Ballard Howles portrays this way of life and its people with keen  perception and powerful authenticity. Reminiscent of the  work of Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, Howles’s prose  pierces the myths of the American cowboy with a sharp  feminist sensibility and reveals the bleakness, the  violence, and the beauty of life in the remote high desert country.
 
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Joaquina Ballard Howles was born and raised on a ranch in rural Nevada north of Winemucca. After graduating from Mills College in Oakland, she married Jeffrey Howles, a British oil executive,  and lived in Alberta, Canada, and London. She published her second novel, Brighter Later in 2020, 54 years after No More Giants.
 
Judy Blunt is professor of English and former director of the creative writing program at the University of Montana. She spent 30 years on ranches in Montana, which she has written about in her Willa Award-winning memoir Breaking Clean.
 
Nancy Cook is a professor emerita for the University of Montana. Raised on sheep ranches, she has written extensively on ranching life, environmental issues, and the literature of the American West.