Good Reads

‘The Road We Traveled’ offers a new meaning of hardship

Everyone loves a good story. And award-winning Jane Kirkpatrick gives us great ones. Stories of love and laughter, pain and heartache, good times celebrated and bad times overcome. But always, always her stories allow us to become a part of another life, another land, another experience that somehow influences our own “A life that is worth stories. writing at all, is worth

“The Road We writing minutely and Traveled” introduces truthfully.” Longfellow. us to Tabby Brown, the She penned it in her “Mother of Oregon,” as memoir. This was a we travel from Missouri along the Oregon Trail truth, but perhaps a with her family. little embellishment now

“Hardship” has a and then wouldn’t hurt new meaning for me either. A story should be after reading her story. interesting after all.(Could I have endured?) Go or stay? Which trails to follow? Known trails with known fears or new ones with uncertainty ahead? Decisions are made with love and a wisdom that comes from generations of family fortitude. With determination, a good shot of stubbornness and her indomitable spirit, Tabby’s journey to a new future allows her to discover her and her family’s unrealized strengths. We learn, too, that “family is stronger than fear.” Oh, and there’s Beatrice the chicken – every good story should have a chicken. We all have wings. – Deb Laslie

Veronica Speedwell is off on a charming, fast-paced story

“I have been brought up to do good works and to conduct myself with propriety and decorum, and yet I am forever doing the unexpected. Something always gives me away for what I really am.”

“And what are you, child?”

“A woman in search of adventure.”

And so we meet Veronica Speedwell in Deanna Raybourn’s series starting with “A Curious Beginning.”

I was delighted it finally worked its way to the top of my pile. It’s a charming, well written story, fastpaced plot with lots of twists and turns and believable characters I love (well, except for the bad guys). Best of all it made me smile.

Miss Veronica Speedwell and her companion, the bad-tempered (but “well proportioned”) natural historian Stoker, apply their talents in hopes of determining just who is trying to kill her – and for heaven’s sake, why? She’s just a self-taught lepidopterist with a lethal hat pin and excellent manners. Enjoy! “Miss Speedwell, I have hiked the length of the Amazon River. I have been accosted by native tribes and shot twice. I have nearly met my death by quicksand, snakebite, poisoned arrows, and one particularly fiendish jaguar. And I have never, until this moment, been quite so surprised by anything as I am by you.”