A zesty and occasionally touching story of a woman confronting crude realities of a new life.
A woman struggles with challenges on the 19th-century American frontier in Melotte’s debut historical series starter.
Catherine Callaway is poised on the edge of losing both the hope and the naïveté that originally brought her to the wilds of 1879 frontier Idaho to set up a cafe with her husband, Patrick: “Drawn in by the attention, romance, and promise of adventures to come, she hadn't imagined how hot, dirty, dusty, and wild the West really was,” readers are told. “It had frightened her some but, as a new, good Christian wife, she felt bound to abide by her husband’s decisions and hoped everything would work out.” Living in the little town of Eagle Rock has been a disillusioning experience for her; the streets are sometimes full of violence, the sheriff seems useless to prevent it, and the demure cafe of her dreams has become a busy saloon. That saloon is also a disappointment to the town’s mayor—a wonderfully hissable bad guy named Luther Armstrong who wants business to go to the rival drinking establishment he’s bankrolling. His plan: If Patrick should have an “accident” and drown in the Snake River, his “arrogant, aloof” wife will certainly pack her bags. It turns out that tragedy has a markedly different effect on Catherine than he—or Catherine herself—could have predicted. Melotte kicks off this trilogy in zippy, energetic style, filling his story with genuine frontier lingo (helpfully footnoted) and keeping the language of most of his characters eye-openingly salty. The dramatic center of the story—Catherine finding the inner strength to take on a pile of troubles—is handled with an engaging sense of compassion. At one point, when a character assures her that she has more friends in town than she thinks, every reader will truly feel it, and they’ll very much want to stay with the series as it goes forward.
A zesty and occasionally touching story of a woman confronting crude realities of a new life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781039133518
Page Count: 327
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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