The Frasers-Clay
Rebecca needs to get to California, but she can't join the wagon train unless she is married, so she begins a hasty search. After all, she is a widow, not some fragile miss, and she figures she can keep her man at bay until the end of the trail and then get an annulment. The selection criteria rapidly narrow down to who's clean and who's not, and she latches onto the Fraser brothers, Clay and Garth. Garth is warm and charming, so Rebecca immediately rejects him: he'd be too hard to leave. Instead, she picks Clay, gets him drunk, and makes him think that they've slept together. A southern man of honor, he marries the sneaky Yankee, but he takes their union seriously, fully intending to consummate it. Their marital battles are soon overshadowed by the hardships of overland travel, however, as Leigh paints a vivid picture of life on the Oregon Trail and of a people still not healed from the Civil War. A must-have, soon to be followed byThe Frasers: Garth.Shelley MosleyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved