This was a difficult book to get caught up in. The beginning chapters were a sentence or two of story and then all kinds of historical data: names, dates, places, stories, etc. I got really tired of all this unending data strung together in random order. At one point, I considered putting the book aside and moving on to something else.
I kept reading and finished the book. It was a passable story but nothing spectacular. Just because you find historical letters or a diary written by an ancestor, doesn’t mean you should turn it into a book. I suppose in the historical sense, it is an accurate representation of the early 1900’s and life in the mountains of Colorado, up to a point. There were a lot of details that weren’t included that would have rounded out the story, like leisure time/day to day activities that were glossed over and I suppose the details weren’t included in the letters that the story was based on, but I thought that with all the historical data that was researched and included, the author would have thought to research and include some of the other more mundane aspects of life in the mountains.
This was basically a coming of age story about two friends, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, at the turn of the 20thcentury, who took some time to find themselves before getting married. That is the basic story. It’s suppose to appear to be a somewhat scandalous notion for the time period.
If you have some extra time on your hands, are looking for any easy read, where you don’t have to invest yourself very much in the story, and you can slog through all types of random and unending historical data, well, then this might be the book for you.
