The novel launches into violence and cartoon clichés with a prologue that is either a hook or a curse, but soon drifts into the plodding first person narration of John Lowry, born to a Pawnee woman and raised by white parents, and Naomi May, a young widow of twenty setting off from Missouri with her family and her former in-laws along the Overland Trail to California. Sadly, what I found instead is the Pioneer version of James Cameron's Titanic, with history relegated to the sidelines in favour of a Young Adult love story between a half-Pawnee mule man and the beautiful and spirited daughter of a family seeking a better future on the Overland Trail to California. The two books don't have a lot in common - a character who straddles the old world and the new world but belongs in neither, and the settling of the West - but another review recommended Amy Harmon's fictional account of her husband's ancestors over Jackson's epic romance, and I was keen to read a more 'realistic' version of white 'emigrants' hunting the American Dream and taking land and life from Native American tribes. I downloaded this novel two years ago, mid-lockdown, after struggling through Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |