From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Fisher builds a grand, mesmerizing novel on the bare chronicle left by her ancestor Emma Ruth Ross Slavin, who was 11 when her family joined the 1847 Oregon migration. Emma's mother, Lucy Mitchell, is a widow, remarried despite her grief for her first husband and resenting the decision of her second husband, Israel Mitchell, to emigrate. James McLaren is a Scottish trapper for the Hudson Bay Company, uneasy both with the emigrants and with the Native Americans, whose fate is bound up with his own. When McLaren loses his children to smallpox and his Nez Perce wife to another trapper, he tracks the trapper to Lucy Mitchell's wagon train. Lucy and McLaren's charged encounter opens her up to the land and him to his own need for roots as he signs on to guide her little band on their trek from the Iowa banks of the Missouri to the Columbia River in Oregon. Fisher tells their storires, past and present, with a poet's sense of the sound and heft of each word. Her compassionate, unsentimental eye makes even minor characters unforgettable. She reveals the labor of running a household when there is no house; equally well, she shows us mountains of death and splendor. In the collision between household and wilderness, Fisher brilliantly illuminates both the tragedy and the new life wrought by manifest destiny. This is a great novel of the American West.
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--This text refers to the
Hardcover
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From Booklist
In 1846, pioneers traveling west to Oregon passed through strange, barren landscapes and experienced weather inconceivable to those raised in the East. Lucy Mitchell talks her husband, Israel, into hiring a skilled frontiersman to lead them and aid them in the journey. The story of Lucy, wife and mother of five, and James MacLaren, a frontiersman, shows how their furtive relationship rescues James from despair and almost destroys Lucy's family. The landscape is a character, shaping and scarring migrants who cling to their culture and customs in the wilderness of the antebellum West. The author's style, consisting of short paragraphs that skip from one character's point of view to another's, requires a careful reader; it's a technique that occasionally disrupts the narrative flow and causes loose threads in the story's texture. However, Fisher's love of the land and history of the western U.S. shows through every line of this story based on her family's history. A serious, finely written novel.
Ellen LoughranCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
