Review: Compelling story of a courageous woman
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 11, 2014
Enjoyed this a lot. Well written and suspenseful story about a woman left to fend for herself in a mountain logging community, who through courage, kindness, and grit, finds her way and helps others in the process.  One truly gets a sense from these pages of how helpless a lone woman must have been in 19th century rural America with the lack of jobs, unfair wages, predatory and chauvinistic men, and ruthless, small town gossips.  Each and every character in the book comes alive under this talented writer's pen, and she does a beautiful job of taking the reader into this time and place. My only gripe is the author's inclusion of the ineffective quotes from Bram Stoker, Longfellow, and the Bible at the top of the chapters, which added nothing and were truly disconcerting.  As an artistic expression of some element of action to come, these particular quotes failed because the quotes themselves were really sort of lukewarm and had little to do with the following events.  Why include quotes from Dracula in a historical novel set in America? I'm assuming it was as a device for continuity as the heroine found Stoker's Dracula in the library, read the Bible to Wanda, and owned Evangeline. But I found them to be forced, distracting and irritating.  Truly took away from this otherwise beautifully written story.