Category: Historical Fiction Publisher: White Bird Publications
ISBN-10: 9781633634114
Type: Fiction
Pages: 329
Copyright: August 20, 2019
Price: $6.99 (eBook)
In 1889, two very different women--one a backwoods reclusive, the other a proper Irish Catholic teen meet on their journeys across the country. Circumstances force them to travel in a gypsy wagon and suffer harrowing experiences until they find what they are looking for.
A lone woman packs her mule and leaves her Pennsylvania home with the bones of her toddler son sewn into her deer skin bag. She walks across the mountains into a world she has never known.
A teenage girl leaves Ohio with her widowed father and little brother on a western journey to fulfill their dreams.
Fate has other plans. Adventure and misfortunes throw these two diverse women together and they must draw on their courage and friendship to survive as they cross miles of prairie.
Excerpt
Kalliope Crippen, born Woodcock, hadn’t seen her
husband, Roger in two weeks which pleased her. Roger was
a mean drunk, and she’d had all of him she ever wanted to
have and then some. Kalliope was not a hard woman.
Instead, she’d been too soft. Soft about his drinking, soft
about his small thieveries, but she’d thought he loved his
son enough to take care of him. She’d trusted him too. And
her beautiful child was dead.
She had tried to go on, tried to forgive him, especially
when he’d come to her, his face wreathed with that frivolous
smile that once had made her heart leap, his voice soft and
wheedling, coaxing. He’d have one hand in his pocket
hiding some cheap gewgaw to buy her forgiveness, the other
reaching out to stroke her hair, her face. But now that he’d
stolen the money that would have gotten them through the
rest of the winter—money for supplies, seeds for next
spring, and shingles to patch the roofs of the house and
barn—It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the
spark that started the fire. If she met up with him right now,
that fire might consume them both. She had no choice but to
leave before Roger returned.
I like historical fiction and survival stories. Your book seems to have both. I especially like the reference to Gypsies, an integral part of the expansion of settlers across the country. Your excerpt is an intriguing introduction into why Kalliope had good reason to leave her husband with winter coming on. Incidentally, very bad time for her to leave and be on the trail west without shelter. But was she thinking about that, too, in her need to leave?
Unfortunately, I have little time to read and about the only way I'm reading books these days is chapter by chapter here on AD. But I believe that this intriguing story will attract people from several genres.
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