pioneers

Bear

Bear by Marian Engel

December 19, 2025 by carmelpie Leave a Comment

Fishwives. Fishwidows. And we all set out to be mermaids. ― Marian Engel, Bear The world was furred with late spring snow. It was the soft, thick stuff that excites you unless you are driving or half dead, packing snow already falling in caterpillars off the greening branches. ― Marian Engel, Bear This is the story of a woman who sequesters herself in a remote area of Ontario, Canada, to catalog an estate bequeathed to the Canadian government. In her isolation, she finds herself, breaking […]

Like the Oregon Trail Game with a Bodice Ripping Mod

Emerald Fire by Julia Grice

March 16, 2024 by Pooja Leave a Comment

Fleeing her plantation home to escape her lecherous cousin, Emerald ends up joining a wagon train headed to California as a mother’s helper. She’s drawn to their guide Mace, but has a long way to go before she can reach her happy ending. More a pioneer adventure than a true romance, we follow Emerald on her way west as the train tangles with illness and injury, hostile Native Americans and a pair of bank robbers. We encounter all kinds of curious characters both on and […]

The Schoolhouse Blizzard

Maddy and the Monstrous Storm by Julie Gilbert

May 14, 2022 by Pooja Leave a Comment

Maddy is new to the prairie, but when she and her classmates are trapped in their schoolhouse by a ferocious blizzard, she must lead them all to safety. I’d first heard of the Schoolhouse Blizzard a year or two ago, when I read Melanie Benjamin’s The Children’s Blizzard, which similarly followed a schoolteacher and a group of schoolchildren who were trapped by the snow and had to fight to survive. This book covers the same topic and themes, but in a way that is more accessible […]

Manifest Destiny was SO cool!

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough

December 28, 2019 by thewheelbarrow Leave a Comment

I read a lot of the criticism about this book when it came out. That it was another white-washing of history and I must admit that I considered that perhaps the outrage was directed more at the idea of the book than the book itself. McCullough is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner after all. Perhaps, I thought, he would discuss the ideas in an objective way that did not avoid the inherent issues with the idea of the pioneers moving west. I am very interested […]

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