This well-written historical novel contains a lot of little-known information about the settling of New Mexico in the early 1900s. The author paints excellent word pictures that bring the story to life through her characters and the setting. Reading it made me want to visit Tusas and learn more about the area.

This is how the story goes:

As a child Edna was passed from one place and one family to another. Pulled from school in Kentucky she goes with her parents to claim the land given to them by the government. Fearing that she would have no education, her mother (named Cassie), returns Edna to her family in Kentucky so she can attend school there. Then, Edna returns home for summer and has fun with the horses and other ranch animals. She fell in love with the land and never wanted to leave. However, her wishes were not granted. Her mother, a nurse, and her father (named Finas) suffering from tuberculosis, moved to Santa Fe. Edna was taken to Servilleta to live with Mrs. Perkins and her family in boarding house. There she felt loved and had the chance to learn, but she worried that her parents would not return for her. She wondered if there was something she was not being told about her father's medical condition. What if he had died and no one told her?

When she feared her husband was in his last days, Cassie retrieves her daughter to allow her to be near her father. Cassie was working to keep the family together financially and couldn't tend to her daughter, so the child is placed among the swishing skirts and smacking rulers of the harsh-hearted prim and proper nuns in a Catholic boarding school. Edna only saw her parents on weekends, but she knew her father was not getting better. Sensing how miserable her daughter was, Cassie allows her visiting sister to take the child to live with her in North Dakota.

Miraculously, Finas recovered from TB. When Edna was nearly twelve years old, she returned to live with her parents who had bought a house on some acreage in Tres Piedras on a high mountain valley near the Tusas River. They had sold the homesteaded land and tar-papered shack in New Mexico. Her bond with her father grew due to their shared love of books and reading as well as their tending to the farm animals. Her bond with her mother took hold around the piano which they both had learned to play, and cooking for the ranch hands. There were parties and social gatherings in their neck of the woods during the late 1920s. Edna loved to dance and was so happy in Tusas she never wanted to leave even to go to school.

Finas' parents came to live with them on the ranch, soon followed by more family members who had fallen upon hard times during the Great Depression. In 1932 Edna decided it was time for her to "stop lolling around on the ranch having a good time with no thought of a future." With summer over and her childhood behind her, Edna heads to Ventura, California for her first year of college. The next fall she transferred to Albuquerque only to find that her parents couldn't afford for her to live there. Before completing her school term, Edna took a job teaching in a one-room log cabin in Taos Junction. After one year, she returned home to teach at Tusas--then, at Red River for two years and several more teaching jobs along the way. She was never in any one place for long, but her heart was always in Tusas--even after her father bought another place in Puncha Valley and moved the family there.

The story dies down about two-thirds of the way through. Therefore, chunks of the story seemed to be missing. Edna married in one chapter, and was 85 years old, her husband and one child dead in the next. I would love to have experienced Edna becoming a mother and a grandmother, but I think the author felt it more important to give information about the history of the area than about the character she had so wonderfully developed.

All in all, it was a very good book and I would read more by Velda Brotherton.