“A Light in the Wilderness” is the first book I have read by author Jane Kirkpatrick. I wasn’t sure about this book when I started reading it, but the more I read the more involved I became with the story.
Letitia is no longer a slave thanks to the papers that show her to be free. However, in this era of United States history, even freed slaves are in danger from those who cannot accept that blacks are people equal with them, at least in the eyes of the Lord and abolitionists. Nancy Hawkins is the wife of a doctor and mother of four children who loves her husband enough to travel with him to a new land in the Oregon territory. Betsy is an Indian from the Willamette Valley in the Oregon territory. This novel travels with these women as two trek from Missouri to Oregon and one who tries to help those travel-weary settlers who come to share her valley.
I found this novel very hard to put down. The lives of these three women were so different from what we know today. I cannot fathom what kind of courage and stamina it took for these settlers who had to face hostile Indians, drought, storms, raging waters, illness and death, not to mention the fate of some poor souls at the hands of unscrupulous men.
I was sent a free print copy by Revell in return for my honest review.
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