"Meet Carolyn Roberts, a forty-something single mom with two teenage sons. She yearns for a simpler, more peaceful life. She fantasizes about building her own straw bale house, but she has no carpentry experience, no directly relevant skills. And like the rest of us, she has the normal excuses of not enough time and not enough money.".

"This is a memoir of a house, but more importantly, a story of a woman who confronts her insecurities and fears, and who escapes our consumer dominated culture to pursue a life attuned to personal values. Her story is, in every way, "a natural building odyssey."".

"This is not a how-to building book, but you will learn about the anatomy of a house. You'll learn the rewards and pitfalls of building with straw bales. You'll experience the agonizing joys of the owner/building process, and the accompanying gamut of wildly fluctuating emotions. Not just for women and not just for home-builders, A House of Straw is for anyone who sets out to accomplish the apparently impossible."--BOOK JACKET.