i received this as an ARC and also listened to it on Audible through Kindle Unlimited.. It was also a Kindle First. Soon after I started listening, I started having misgivings about this and questioned whether to continue or DNF; KI decided to continue since I was listening to it and would be able to finish it in a shorter time than if I had read it and also, I could use it in some challenges with it. Had I been reading it physically or on mu Kindle, I surely would have DNF'd it. I could not connect with the characters and found it rather boring and Josie, rather unlikable.

This book sucked me in. I love hearing about Josies life, but then it ended so abruptly that I went to look into her life to learn more about her. The Josie portrayed in this book, and what was really her life in Tombstone were vastly different, and I feel jaded about how much I loved her story at first.

Many may not know that the legendary Wyatt Earp is buried in a cemetery next to his Jewish wife, Josephine Sarah Marcus. Josie Marcus was the rebellious daughter of a Jewish immigrant family from San Francisco who refused to follow the rules of her mother, her home, and her tribe. In her teens, Josie ran away to appear in a road company operetta. Finding she had no talent for show business she nevertheless fell in love with the wildness and freedom of the west and, specifically, Tombstone, AZ. Josie leaves home as her mother declares her dead to the family, and the errant daughter takes up with n'er do well, Johnny Behan. Despite her best attempts to remain a "good" girl until Johnny marries her, she succumbs to the mores of Tombstone and "shacks up" acting as stepmother to Johnny's son and common law wife to Johnny.

The couple is ill matched and Johnny's abusiveness is more than Josie can take. She is attracted to the tall, handsome Wyatt Earp and he to her ever though both have other partners at the time. In a scene reminiscent of West Side Story, the two pledge their troth without marriage license or justice of the peace. However, their relationship causes bad blood between Wyatt and Johnny and leads to a proverbial showdown which many blame on Josie.

This is a love story and it is told through the eyes of Josie, a new twist on the story of Tombstone and the Earps. It addresses, in the kindest way to Josie, her fall from grace, from cossetted if restricted daughter of the Jewish tradition to a woman who barely misses becoming a "soiled dove" to stay alive.

The storytelling is solid although some characters are glossed over. Maddie Earp for example, Wyatt's other paramour is barely mentioned and the impact of Wyatt's indiscretion with Josie is dismissed.

Josie is an intriguing character, a woman who strays far from her upbringing and roots and is independent in ways that most women of the time could not even contemplate. Her conflicts between old mores and new behaviors makes for a multi-dimensional character.

The book is definitely a page turner and should be popular with anyone looking for historical biographical fiction and books about liberated women.

Josephine was a happy San Francisco city girl when she went south the wilds of Arizona to marry . Instead of her intended she met and married her match, Wyatt Earp. He proved to be her soulmate as they traversed his wild career and history. Josephine was bold for her time, independent and stood up for her self. She was a enigma in the wild west . This is her story told brilliantly with all the action of the wild west.

A novel about Josephine Marcus, a Jewish girl from San Francisco who ends up becoming Wyatt Earp's common-law wife and spending most of her life with him. This is a pretty intriguing bit of historical detail to base a novel on; unfortunately it didn't quite work for me. I can't say it's bad exactly. It's just not what I wanted.

The first and most important flaw is that the book is told in first person and Adams gives Josephine a very strong, specific voice. A bold choice! But a risky one, and one that I never adjusted to. I just never felt that it was a real person speaking instead of some shallow stereotype of 'feisty Wild West lady'. Here's an example from the opening pages:
Let’s face it: aging is a bitch for everybody. It’s a dumb joke that’s replayed every day when you awaken from dreams where you’re running around in your prime, chasing after men long dead with an ache in your pants, only to find yourself as you really are: creaky and misshapen, breasts touching belly, and alone in the spare bedroom under the roof of distant relations. But for a beautiful woman like I was—and don’t just take my word for it; even our enemies said I was the most beautiful woman to ever step off a stage in Tombstone—it’s even harder. Sometime in your teens men just start turning toward you, waking up to you (and women begin to prickle, although you hardly take the time to understand why)—the rabbi, his son, the wealthier widowers eyed hungrily by the mothers of the congregation for their daughters. You discover your power in the world and you itch to exercise it, to leave your mother’s shadow and find your rightful glorious place in the new world beyond the shtetl by the sea, San Francisco, where the German Jews lorded over us Prussian immigrants. And all that time when you should have been gaining character—reading books, learning languages, growing wiser, and mastering hardships—you’ve been busy tossing your curls from one shoulder to the next and rushing headlong into a future that you assume will catch you.
I wasn’t dumb. I was just distracted by the sway of my own breasts. Beauty brings trust in the universe, and then, in that cruel joke, over time it rescinds your power. Your brow furrows, your vanity chisels your features, and the frontier wind batters your skin. That demon strand of gray weaves itself into the brown. Your chest grows and grows in a race with your thighs. One day you’re walking alone down a street and no heads turn, no eyes seek you out, and you’re not a pillar of society or a great thinker or the mother of a brood of scholars, but a little woman in shabby shoes long out of fashion, writing letters to the editors and trying to exert some control over a life that’s disappeared.

See what I mean? It's not bad, and I'm sure it's exactly to many people's taste. Just not mine. (Also, it might be unfair, but I have to quote this line, which made me howl with presumably unintentional laughter: His feelings were as real and solid as his biceps.)

Overall, the book is bit more romance novel than historical fiction in its tone and focus, though it's always a blurry line between those genres. There's a surprising amount of page time given over to Josephine's first man, Sheriff Johnny Behan, who ends up coming off as a more of a major character than Wyatt Earp, and definitely more specific and well-rounded. Earp is always a bit of a romanticized cipher.

Last Woman Standing unsurprisingly puts its climax on the gunfight at the OK Corral, though it left me with more questions than answers. Why are these people even fighting? Why has a single fight involving less than ten people come to be the most famous of the whole 'Wild West', a period of time that surely included more interesting events? Why was Tombstone itself such a big deal anyway, given the number of boomtowns in the late 1800s? (Wikipedia proved more revealing on these topics than the novel: never a good sign.)

In the end, I wouldn't call Last Woman Standing a waste of my time, but I wouldn't recommend it either.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1914630610