Description
The premise of the book seemed very interesting when I first picked it up. Three women travel west from Chicago with a wagon train, each looking to escape cruel men from their pasts. Beth and her mother, Ginny, are fleeing Thaddeus Rutledge, who locked Ginny in an asylum for expressing her opinions and planned to marry Beth off to a wealthy acquaintance of his who is at least twice her age. Kat, another escapee from the asylum, joins them, and insists they bring along a wounded man they find in an alley. Together, they must not only face the dangers of the road but also the knowledge that Thaddeus will surely not wish to be thwarted.
While the dangers of the westward journey do make appearances in the book, for the most part it alternates between being meditative and more focused on the danger they face from Thaddeus once he learns of Beth and Ginny’s flight. Thaddeus himself is a flat character, as are most in the book besides Beth and Ginny. Secondary characters appear and disappear as needed without much life behind them, and the climax is over with quickly. In all, I found it a dull example of a western.