It's Tough Being a Sophomore

 

I've had Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson on my to-read list for a while. I finally got around to it, and I really enjoyed the book. It is about an orphaned young woman who inherits a claim in Montana from a long-lost uncle in 1918. The challenge is that Hattie has less than a year to finish proving up on the claim, meaning she has to build a lot of fence and grow crops when she's never done either. Fortunately for Hattie, she is surrounded by good neighbors. like Perilee and Karl Mueller, Leafie, and Rooster Jim. With their help, she gets the fence finished and brings her crops to harvest. In return, she helps the Muellers with their children (actually saving them from a herd of wild horses) and nurses the family through a bout of Spanish flu. Over the course of the year, she becomes part of the community. It's a nice, feel-good story.

However, this is during World War I, and not everything is feel-good. Karl is a German immigrant, and he faces a great deal of prejudice from some people in town. There is also a young rancher whose ranch borders Hattie's claim and who is the chair of the local patriotic defense group that is responsible for the harassment that Karl and others face. The reader is kept guessing until the very end whether he will become Hattie's love interest or the story's villain. It's a really well-written and enjoyable story that I finished in only three days (of course, it is a young adult novel....).

Since I liked the book so much, I jumped right in to the sequel, Hattie Every After. This story follows Hattie as she leaves Montana for new adventures in San Francisco. Through persistence and good luck, Hattie manages to work her way to the reporting staff of the city's main newspaper, the Chronicle, gaining a couple of kind of unbelievable "scoops" along the way. 

And that "unbelievable" part is where the sequel breaks down for me. A lot of pretty incredible things happened to Hattie in the first book (like the aforementioned incident with the wild horses), but the story is so invested in Hattie, and the reader gets inside her head so thoroughly that you really don't mind. The second book seems kind of rushed and yet also kind of empty. It seemed that there is a much more "tell" rather than "show" approach, and that Hattie just tells how she felt about things rather than letting the reader see through her eyes. A lot of the events are just TOO unbelieveable, really, and the career path that gets Hattie into the newsroom probably would never actually happen. There's also an underdeveloped plot that ends up being of major importance yet is just thrown in here and there throughout the story. To make a long story short, I wasn't really captivated by the sequel, but at least it ended the way I wanted (ha).

You see this pretty often in popular culture, where the first iteration of something is just really, really good and creative and well-executed, only to be followed by a sophomore effort that is forced and trying too hard to re-capture the magic of the original. No doubt about it, it's tough to catch lightning in a bottle twice!

So Much Fascinating History So Close to Home

 

I live in a state that borders the Mississippi River. I've crossed the river several times traveling to and fro on family trips. I probably will cross it again at some point, maybe multiple times. But I will never look at it the way I did before reading Lee Sandlin's history of the river during the antebellum period in this country - Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild.

This was a fascinating book. I know a history class can't cover everything that happens, but there were several major events in this book that I'd never heard of (or only vaguely). For example, there's an account of the wreck of the steamboat Sultana - the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. I'd heard the name before, but had no idea how awful it was. Sandlin does a good job conveying the horror. There's information about the New Madrid earthquake, as well as the siege of Vicksburg that was a key to the Union victory in the Civil War. One thing that struck me as I was reading was how the river was at the heart of some of the major events in the country's history.

But one thing I really appreciated was learning about some things I'd never heard of. There was an interesting chapter about New Orleans and the slave auctions, including prices ("girls" for sexual uses were the most expensive slaves, costing up to $5,000). One of the chapters that was especially eye-opening was about a multi-year scare over a possible slave revolt that resulted from what was basically a scam to sell a book. The unfounded fears the book started snowballed into a purge of anyone, black or white, who was even remotely rumored to know something about a revolt. Sometimes just being asked questions was enough to get someone lynched, whether there was any basis to the suspicion. One of the stories Sandlin told was of a slave owner who was ordered to flog one of his slaves who was accused (falsely) of being involved with the (nonexistent) revolt. The owner refused. The "investigators" said they would flog the slave owner instead. So he began to beat the slave, but he wasn't hitting the slave hard enough to suit the "investigators." They hung both men. Some things about that whole incident sounded pretty contemporary; as Sandlin observed, "One reason people were so quick to believe in the Murrell excitement was that they were eager to believe in anything, no matter how strange, as long as it was bad news" (p. 232).

Overall, this was a great read - full of interesting information and written in a compelling style. I thought it was kind of funny, though, that the last chapter fell kind of flat compared to the rest of the book. That seemed fitting, though, because after the Civil War, government engineers began to tame the river through dredging and levees, and railroads began to carry a lot of the people and goods that once depended on the water "highway." The Big River was no longer wild and no longer as big a deal.