rough house

Tina Ontiveros was born into a family with logging on both sides: a mother who spent summers driving logging trucks for her family's operation, and a father born to an itinerant logger and raised in a variety of lumber towns, as Tina herself would be. rough house is a story of growing up in turmoil, of a childhood split between a charming, mercurial, abusive father in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and a mother struggling with poverty in The Dalles. It is also a story of generational turmoil, especially for the women of her family, of violent men and societal restrictions, of children not always chosen and frequently raised alone.