Love this book so much. And I thoroughly enjoyed the audiobook, too. I highly recommend it. ( )

at first i thought i was going to like this book, because the beginning is well written, with an excellent sense of place and setting. unfortunately that's about all it has. i think the story itself is interesting - it does a good job of showing the real-life side of things like the property law, that women couldn't own land or legally sign for themselves, or like how women didn't have a legal right to their children. she does that well enough, and the plot points were interesting all on their own.

however, a well-drawn setting and interesting plot points sprinkled throughout aren't enough for me. the characters are shades of people, with literally nothing about them filled in. no motivation, no thoughts, no reason, no sympathy, no feeling, nothing. i don't know anything about these people (aside from the biographical points of their lives) or their feelings or really even their relationship, which is what this book is supposed to be about. these were all characters that i feel like i should have liked, and would have if any of them were given the slightest depth.

i was able to take the relationships in their time, and tried not to look with too modern an eye on it all. things that i expected to be problematic for me weren't at all, but i found plenty more to gripe about. i just can't see writing a book about a relationship where the only way you know the two characters are in love is because they say so. and because they don't leave each other, i guess. there is just no feeling in any of the book. plus the ending drops off a cliff. and so many little things along the way that were clumsily put in the story, obviously to push or pull things a certain direction. but mostly it was how detached we were from the characters that is my chief issue with the book. this could have been well done, and i expect as she wrote more she got better at it. ( )

I did not like the characters. Imogene bullied Sarah, hit on her students that were half her age, and was physically abusive to Matthew and the rapist which could have been called for. And poor Sarah, she was just too young.
I do give the author credit for knowing the time period and Nevada. ( )

A tale of two women trying to live on a farm in the 19th century. ( )

Not well written. I was going to say that it wasn't badly written, either, although that isn't exactly true - but it's written in such a way that I can go for several pages at a time without seeing a piece of writing that I would have done differently.

Similarly, I didn't really like either of the main characters, but I didn't dislike them, either. I didn't care about them a whole lot one way or the other.

The pacing of the book also seemed weird and disconnected to me. It ended very suddenly. The storyline went on for a long time and covered a long period (despite being only ~360 pages) but a lot of scenes seemed like they could be taken out without having any effect whatsoever on the overall story.

On the other hand, it had some nice descriptions - and I haven't really read Western-type novels before, so maybe part of what I didn't like was the genre itself. I'd probably give it 2.5 stars overall. ( )