NONFICTION
The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West
by Christopher Corbett, $26
During the 1849 California Gold Rush, thousands of Chinese workers made the voyage across the Pacific Ocean to the American West hoping to strike it rich. Whether or not they succeeded, many eventually opted to return home. Even those who perished were frequently exhumed from their graves and repatriated by fellow countrymen. But Polly Bemis was in it for the long haul.
In his exhaustively researched “The Poker Bride,” Christopher Corbett tells how Bemis — a Chinese woman who probably arrived in the United States as a concubine — wound up living in a remote Idaho wilderness for more than 50 years with a Connecticut-born gambler who had won her in a poker game. By the time she descended from the mountains in 1923, she had become a kind of modern Rip Van Winkle.
“When Polly Bemis arrived in Grangeville (Idaho) the summer after her husband had died, she was a celebrated curiosity, a living reminder of the Gold Rush that was fast becoming legend in the Pacific Northwest,” writes Corbett. “She had gone up into the mountains . . . a mere seven years after the American Civil War was over, when the Indian wars were still raging and there was still an emperor on the throne in Peking.”
Corbett uses Bemis’ story as the platform for a larger discussion about the hardships of the Chinese experience in the American West.
Bemis’ long trek — from rural China, to San Francisco, to the Salmon River — was no picnic, but its ending, no matter how curious, was happier than many.
FICTION
Every Last One
by Anna Quindlen, $26
Anna Quindlen’s protagonist, Mary Beth Latham, thinks of herself as “Average. Ordinary. More or less.” She’s blessed with three teenage children whom she dotes over, a happy marriage and pleasurable work as boss of her own landscape business.
The book’s first sentence plants the seeds of foreboding. Mary Beth wakes to “the murmuring of a public-radio announcer, telling (her) that there has been a coup in Chad, a tornado in Texas.” But she is soon engrossed in the meals, school meetings and recitals that fill her days.
Glen Latham thinks his wife is overinvolved in the inner lives of their children, especially their confident, 17-year-old daughter, Ruby. Mother and daughter have a special bond, but it undergoes new strains in Ruby’s senior year high school as she breaks up with her boyfriend. He grew up in the house next door, and Mary Beth hates to see him heartbroken.
Ruby’s earlier eating disorder has primed Mary Beth for signs of clinical depression, which she believes she sees when one of her 14-year-old twins loses interest in school, bathing and leaving the house.
She suspects he feels overshadowed by his more popular and athletic brother.
It’s a testament to Quindlen’s character development and plotting that by the time disaster hits, the catastrophic consequences of everyday actions are truly shocking. The Latham home seemed so safe and sound to Mary Beth that she was blind to the danger lurking outside.
As Mary Beth moves through shock and grief in the aftermath of great upheaval, hidden aspects of her life come to light. She must face what she fears most and somehow try to keep on going. Quindlen succeeds at conveying the transience of everyday worries and the never-ending boundaries of a mother’s love.
