Maggie Brandt, a third-generation farmer, is cultivating a few acres of organic vegetables in rural Colorado – a place where industrial farming reigns supreme – when the Great Recession hits. After months of unemployment, her husband, Fish, takes a job with an oil and gas company, a decision that threatens their marriage and alienates their teenage daughter, Ozzie, a budding environmental crusader. As the wider community organizes against a billionaire outsider who is buying farmland and, more worryingly, water rights in the moisture-starved county, Maggie’s grandmother, Flora, grapples with the painful echoes of her own past. Faced with intolerable layers of loss, Maggie, Flora, and Ozzie skirt the boundaries of the law in their efforts to save the farm and the ecosystems that support it.

Deeply engaged with the realities of rural life in a country that consistently directs resources to the wealthy, Boyles grounds the threats posed by resource extraction and consolidation of land and water ownership in the wrenching, rich lives of her characters. At once tender and urgent, Appraisals is a moving portrayal of ecological and financial catastrophe, the powerful generational bonds between women, and the fierce impulse to protect the places we love.