“A Clearing in the Wild,” by Jane Kirkpatrick (WaterBrook Press, 400 pages, $13.99)
The year is 1851, and the place is Bethel, Mo., where Emma Wagner lives with her parents in a religious colony of German immigrants who try to stay clear of their neighbors’ worldly influence. Yet Emma privately welcomes change and newness, making her sometimes feel like a square peg in a round hole.
There is talk of another move. The colony’s leaders believe they have become too dependent on the money they make from sales of their fine gloves and the wine and whiskey they brew. Their leader, Father Keil, has sent scouts to Kentucky and the Carolinas, searching for recruits and new land. Soon Christian Giesty, Keil’s handsome assistant, whom Emma loves, will leave to investigate possibilities in the Oregon Territory.
They marry soon after Christmas, and Emma looks forward to the trip, only to be told she must remain behind. Never one to take no as an answer, she manages to convinces the leader she will be more of an asset than a liability, and he relents.
They travel on horseback, and the going is difficult. She discovers she is pregnant. Because she speaks little English, conversation with fellow travelers is sometimes difficult, but Emma relishes the adventure. When they finally reach Fort Steilacoom and a doctor, she is eight months pregnant and protests against Christian leaving her to go in search of other land.
Left alone, she is befriended by several women at the Fort where she learns some of the local Indian ways. Christian returns after the baby is born with news of land that satisfies him. The scouts are sent back to Bethel to lead the others west. Christian chastises her, especially for adopting Indian ways. Yet even as Emma defends herself, she worries about what the colonists will think of this place when they finally arrive.
The narration then shifts back and forth from the leader’s wife, Louisa Keil, who is still in Missouri, to Emma until Emma finally leaves us with a mixture of hope and uncertainty.
Though the author’s late introduction of another narrator tends to disrupt the pace, Kirkpatrick’s extensive knowledge of Oregon history provides the shape and detailed substance to another inspirational story about the power of belief and the strength of the human spirit.
“Juniper Blue,” by Susan Lang (University of Nevada Press, 328 pages, $20)
Ruth Farley, introduced in Lang’s earlier “Small Rocks Rising,” lives on her Glory Springs homestead in the Mojave Desert. She is now the mother of twins, a boy and a girl, whose looks and temperaments are so different she wonders how they could have had the same father.
Money is scarce after the stock market crash, and Ruth keeps her inheritance under her bed. She buys the few groceries she needs in the nearest town, keeps a goat and has a garden. Her horse, Juniper Blue, reminds her of her lover, Jim, who was murdered by a cowboy and is buried across the wash from the garden. One day she decides to drive over to the Black Canyon Reservation with the twins to visit his people and is well-received.
Then a letter from her mother arrives with news that she plans to stop off to see her in Los Angeles on her way to Las Vegas. With bitter memories of her childhood in El Paso, Ruth suspects her mother wants something.
A friend offers to care for the twins and Ruth makes the trip, and, to buoy her confidence, she stays in a fancy hotel and buys new clothes. At their meeting, Ruth listens to her mother’s hard luck story and pleads for a share of Ruth’s inheritance until she finally agrees to give her $1,000 with the understanding that her mother will never contact her again. That night Ruth parties and drinks and makes love with a handsome man she meets at the hotel before heading back to Glory Springs.
Weeks later, after visiting the reservation, she spots a van beside the road. Thinking someone might be hurt, she stops, and David Stone, an anthropologist digging for artifacts, comes into her life. Then one night, in the midst of a sandstorm, she happens upon the Palm Springs Cricket Club where the guests are all connected with a movie being made there, and she ends up taking a bit part.
Back home, anxious to regain some sanity in her life, she seeks out her dead lover’s people again only to come home to find that perhaps nothing can keep the world at bay.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional fiction.
