Synopsis
Struggling to provide for herself and her young brother in Depression-era Kansas, nineteen-year-old Hallie Meredith lucks into a job as cook with the MacLeod family's threshing operation, where she helps the family meet a dangerous adversary.
Reviews
Williams (Daughter of the Storm) should widen her audience with her latest western romance, which boasts a realistic plot, sound characterization and effective use of historical detail. The Midwest wheat fields that cover the no longer unbounded prairie of the early part of the century are the backdrop for this tale of 19-year-old Hallie Meredith and her five-year-old half-brother Jackie, as she seeks work and shelter after being propositioned by her slimy employer. The siblings are haunted by experiences of abandonment: Hallie was bereft when her widowed father married a second wife, Felicity, and his death was the final blow. Felicity now has left Jackie with Hallie so she can remarry. A brighter future beckons when threshers Garth and Rory MacLeod hire Hallie as cookhouse help. But a crippling accident, dirty politics, complex rivalries and other circumstances threaten the threshing business as well as Garth and Hallie's budding love. Though hampered by an abrupt ending, this story of the simple pleasures and harsh realities of farm life is raised above formula by its winning depiction of a more innocent time.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Hallie Meredith, age 19, is an orphan left to care for her five-year-old half-brother when her stepmother decides to give him away so she can remarry. Hallie ends up as assistant cook on a threshing team, which travels throughout the summer and fall, clearing farmers' fields. The rhythm of the hard work and care for her brother keep her content, especially as she falls in love with the team's leader, Garth MacLeod. Naturally, complications arise to keep the destined lovers apart--a powerful local man who has his eye on Hallie as his mistress; a shrewish farm girl in love with MacLeod; MacLeod's brother, who is in love with Hallie; and MacLeod's possessive daughter. Williams fills the book with period and technical farming details as she carries Hallie through one season as a cook and the start of another as the project engineer and fianc{‚}ee of Garth MacLeod. Sure to be called for is this historical fiction set in the American heartland of the 1920s. Denise Perry Donavin
Part historical and part romance, this novel of life on the Kansas prairie in the 1920s follows Hallie Meredith's 19th year. Left to care for her abandoned five-year-old brother, Hallie joins the MacLeod threshing outfit as cook. The crew becomes their family, and Hallie is drawn to the two MacLeod brothers, outgoing Rory and enigmatic Garth. Times are tough for the MacLeods, who are forced to struggle against the land and the growing political clout of enemy Quentin Raford. Raford, who manages to gain control of most of the area's farms and businesses, tries to put the MacLeods out of business. Williams (The Longest Road, St. Martin's, 1993) paints the Kansas landscape vividly; she also describes the prejudices and politics of the time, although somewhat more pedantically. An enjoyable story for light fiction collections.
M. Janet Simmons, Duluth P.L., Minn.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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