I'm not into romances and although this seemed a little too sweet, I enjoyed it. The characters were well-developed.

This was an enthralling story of travel on the Oregon trail, The historical perspective of a former slave and a native American was both interesting and educational. I loved it and will make it a habit to read all of Jane Kirkpatrick 's work.

I loved and hated this book. It was wonderful and sad all at the same time. The author wove a tale that will break your heart and lift you up. I highly recommend this book to all. It will show that love crosses all boundaries and race never matters when love is alive.

I couldn't put this book down! It was both enjoyable to read and really informative - I didn't know as much as I thought about the Oregon Trail (despite being a self-proclaimed expert at the game!), and what I loved most about the story was the ability for the reader to feel as if they were traveling the OT right along with the characters. What an experience! I also really loved the race explorations of this book - the experience of the black protagonist as she moved from place to place, all the while never being allowed to forget the color of her skin. Whether the racism was overt and dangerous or insidious and litigious, it was still something that always had to be dealt with. I was fascinated to read about the so-called "free territories" and how property and marriage and ownership laws worked during that time. I was rooting for Letitia the whole time - and so anxious for her as she clutched those papers that proved her free status.

Knowing this story was based on the life of a real woman, I wish the information at the back of the book would've been presented at the beginning. Knowing who the book was written about can help people get through a book that otherwise might seem a little slow. I love historical fiction, and the fact that this was based on a true story was so interesting. What an inspirational woman Letitia was! More stories like this will history come alive.

Great Story to Share During Black History Month

She could be a victim, or she could fight for the rights only white men enjoyed under 19th Century law. Letitia Carson, a freed slave, decided not to "put up and shut up." Her story is all the more remarkable because it really happened. The list of nonfiction books and journals that assisted Kirkpatrick's understanding of Letitia fill up several pages. A common theme is the Struggle for Civil Rights. There's Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America; From Slavery to Segregation; "Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory;" "The Brazen Overlanders of 1845;" and more. One of the most poignant titles is "Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery."

"History is the spine of my stories, with characters providing the flesh and blood of life", Jane Kirkpatrick tells an interviewer in an Afterword to "A Light in the Wilderness."

Facebook has a "Friends of Letitia Carson" page. It's full of information that confirms what Kirkpatrick writes about in the novel. E.g. "Here is the latest article about Letitia Carson vs. Greenberry Smith, in 1852-1856. It is being published by the Oregon State Bar Association in their official Journal, the Bulletin. Circulation is 19,000, including all 17,000 lawyers, judges, legal clerks, law professors and other members of the Oregon State Bar:" http://www.orww.org/…/Letitia_C…/Libr...

Kirkpatrick says she was taken aback by a reporter who asked "what business did I have writing of Indians when I wasn't one," but she didn't set out to write about an Indian woman. She wrote a story of a Marie Dorion, a strong womanwho happened to be an Indian. "That's how I approached Letitia's story, about a strong woman who also happened to be African American," she adds.

"Ordinary" women like Letitia often show extraordinary courage and strength, not just in the challenges of homesteading in the 1800s American West, but in all aspects of life.

She became the first African American woman to own land in the United States. Her place in history is not well known to most Americans, but historical fiction is a great way to change that. A carefully researched novel like this one brings the past to life and lets us travel another time and place.

"History is the spine of my stories," Jane Kirkpatrick tells an interviewer in an Afterword to the novel, "with characters providing the flesh and blood of life."

Great Story to Share During Black History Month

She could be a victim, or she could fight for the rights only white men enjoyed under 19th Century law. Letitia Carson, a freed slave, decided not to "put up and shut up." Her story is all the more remarkable because it really happened. The list of nonfiction books and journals that assisted Kirkpatrick's understanding of Letitia fill up several pages. A common theme is the Struggle for Civil Rights. There's Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America; From Slavery to Segregation; "Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory;" "The Brazen Overlanders of 1845;" and more. One of the most poignant titles is "Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery."

"History is the spine of my stories, with characters providing the flesh and blood of life", Jane Kirkpatrick tells an interviewer in an Afterword to "A Light in the Wilderness."

Facebook has a "Friends of Letitia Carson" page. It's full of information that confirms what Kirkpatrick writes about in the novel. E.g. "Here is the latest article about Letitia Carson vs. Greenberry Smith, in 1852-1856. It is being published by the Oregon State Bar Association in their official Journal, the Bulletin. Circulation is 19,000, including all 17,000 lawyers, judges, legal clerks, law professors and other members of the Oregon State Bar:" http://www.orww.org/…/Letitia_C…/Library/Zybach_20161001.pdf

Kirkpatrick says she was taken aback by a reporter who asked "what business did I have writing of Indians when I wasn't one," but she didn't set out to write about an Indian woman. She wrote a story of a Marie Dorion, a strong womanwho happened to be an Indian. "That's how I approached Letitia's story, about a strong woman who also happened to be African American," she adds.

"Ordinary" women like Letitia often show extraordinary courage and strength, not just in the challenges of homesteading in the 1800s American West, but in all aspects of life.

She became the first African American woman to own land in the United States. Her place in history is not well known to most Americans, but historical fiction is a great way to change that. A carefully researched novel like this one brings the past to life and lets us travel another time and place.

"History is the spine of my stories," Jane Kirkpatrick tells an interviewer in an Afterword to the novel, "with characters providing the flesh and blood of life."

Where I as a writer would say "Two men stood arguing in front of the Platte County courthouse," Kirkpatrick adds concrete details, as if she'd time-traveled the scene: "Men's voice sliced the air like whips of a field marse, sharp and stinging, The air was heavy as a wet, wool quilt, yet dust billowed around the two men as it did when bulls scraped the earth." Not only is her prose vivid and illuminating, it's poetic.

Opinion goes against the man named Davey Carson, but Letitia believes he's innocent of the charges against him, even when others brush past him, "leaving the Irishman like a shriveled pickle in the bottom of the barrel, no one wanting to touch it."

Letitia knows the feeling. She knows the rules and shows her papers when asked, "only to endure the sneers and snarls of 'free black' as though the word meant stink or worse, a catching kind of poison spread by being present near her breath."

Letitia counts her blessings, though, not just the offenses against her. "She'd earned money helping birth babies, enough to buy a cow." She was on her way to Oregon, "where people wanted to join the States as free. She'd be free there too, and without slavery and its uncertainty hovering like a cloud of fevered mosquitoes." She could try her hand living alone, or "if she married and had children, they'd be born free and no one could ever sell them away from her. What property she had would be hers to keep. Like the cow she owned."

Her cow is usurped by the disgruntled wife who wants to keep Letitia with her on the Oregon Trail as cheap labor, but Letitia stands up for herself, keeps her milk cow, and even dares to tell her former masters that she would find her own way to Oregon rather than "earn her keep" by serving them along the trail.

A kind Irish immigrant, none other than the unjustly maligned Davey Carson, gives Letitia a housekeeping job. He doesn't take advantage of her in any way. He wants to offer her more, but it's illegal for whites to marry blacks. Letitia agrees to a union that is not legally recognized, but loyalty and devotion transcend the law.

Just when things are going well, with a newborn baby boy in Oregon, new troubles arise. "Herd's growing. Garden sendin' up shoots. We selling butter and cheese and beef this year... Why you want to leave that" in search of gold?" Letitia asks Davey, who wants to join the hoards of men heading to Sutter's. She's also "worried about that exclusion law" and what'll happen to her and the children and the farm if "anyone of color has to leave Oregon," but Davey doesn't think anyone will enforce "the crazy law" even if voters do make Oregon a slave state when it joins the Union.

Not only does the exclusion law pass, but so does "a law forbidding persons of color to testify against a white man. If a white neighbor stole something from a colored man, the courts were no recourse."

Despite all Letitia's concerns and pleas, Davey rides off in search of gold. Sure enough, two horsemen show up, ordering the "wench" and her "mulatto brats" to leave. You'll have to read the book (or wade through various history journals) to see if Letitia stays or goes. I'll leave you with this:

"She was powerless to change the law, but she could change how she defended against it, what stories she told herself, a slave of anger or a free woman. Her children required it. She didn't know then how much."

"Now more than ever," {to use an phrase I've come to hate}, this novel deserves more attention.