Against All Odds

Lucy Mitchum was not happy when her husband Noah decided they would sell their house in Baltimore, take their four year old daughter, and travel in a covered wagon to California, where Noah hoped to find gold. But even Lucy knew it was hard to make a living in the east, so she agreed to the plan. But it will take all of Lucy and Noah's courage to survive the difficult journey intact. I am 13 and I enjoyed this book a lot, even though it was an adult book.

This easy-to-read novel chronicles the movement of Lucy Scott Mitchum across the prairies and through the wilds and over the mountains to her new home in the Sacramento Valley. Although this is not a scholarly work, it is a realistic rendering of the worries and problems facing a woman moving West in a troubling times. What I liked best about this book is that far from painting these immigrants with the usual "hero" paintbrush and making them bigger that life, Barbara Riefe was able to make them human beings with all the failings that that entails. Her Lucy Scott Mitchum made love, worried about friendships, worried about her child, and loved her husband, even though she did not think he was infalable. Just as in real life, there was not an entirely happy ending, but not an entirely unhappy one either. I look forward to Barbara Reife's further books