Review: A book desperately in need of an editor-spoiler alert
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 07 11, 2013
This book could have been improved with a strong editor, but as is, it reads as if it were written by a committee- or over such an extended period of time that the author forgot what she had written. It takes place between October and Christmas of one year, during which time the two main characters meet, she has a baby, they fall in love, they become lovers, and conceive another child- with which she is 4 weeks pregnant at Christmas. Both characters go through massive personality changes, because being in love makes him want to stop being a cold-hearted greedy Scrooge (an analogy used in the book) and she is cured of her fear of others. I've never read a book in which there was so much foreshadowing of events that never take place. The hero is shot- but we don't have any efforts to find out who did it or to bring them to justice. The heroine is thought of as a witch by the community because she uses herbal cures (despite that being fairly standard medicine in the 19th century), but suddenly that's dropped and we never hear about it again. Most preposterous of all, the heroine supposedly has lost 6 children due to Rh incompatability...but she is in such robust health that after losing a baby in October, she's ready to have sex later that month! Then, they go off to find a doctor who can explain this. I was befuddled to read in the postward that the author was quite aware that Rh factor was not identified until 1939, and the book takes place in 1882. The ABO blood type system was unknown until 1901, but somehow, this lucky couple finds a doctor who not only knows about Rh (not by that name, but the principles of it) AND can test them to determine that the hero is also Rh-, so that their baby will survive. Amid all that, which you would think would be quite enough for 3 months' events, they also rescue a pregnant teenager, travel across Canada and visit Niagara Falls, Toronto and New Brunswick, before meeting up with the doctor in Philadelphia. The parts about visiting Niagara Falls and Toronto seem well-researched, but disconnected from the rest of the plot. It was reminiscent of the student research paper error of trying to squeeze in every single bit of research that was done, whether it really fit the overall theme or not. Some events were just too out of character for believability, such as the heroine going off to be a nurse during the US Civil War all by herself at the age of 16- and her father supporting that decision, despite him being a Canadian minister. Considering the reputation of nurses at that time, I seriously doubt any minister would let his 16 year old daughter go to another country all by herself, but the author doesn't even use the plot device of her joining the Red Cross, going with a mission group, or any other sort of rational explanation. The train trip, and the sightseeing, were interesting, but marred by the same events happening over and over: the wife protests her husband's extravagance in staying in luxury hotels, and he proudly boasts that he can afford it, and they keep meeting people who are so charmed by them that they give them gifts. They're nice rich people, I get it. Everyone loves them, despite the fact that everyone in their town considered him a cold-hearted businessmen out to ruin poor folks like her first husband, only a matter of a few weeks earlier. The only reason I kept reading was see if she really WAS going to be burned at the stake for being a witch, in 1882 Canada, for using common cures that were part of the US Pharmacopeia 50 years earlier.