This Road

For the most part, I do not like Jane Kirkpatrick, but for some reason I keep picking up her books and reading them. I even have three of her books that are sitting in my TBR pile. I will say this: Jane writes fascinating prose that engages the reader from the very first page. Her depth of character development makes the reader feel intimately acquainted with the characters, and the plot movement gives the reader the feeling of actually being in the moment of the narrative.

Jane's books are based on historical figures and are basically novelizations of real events. Some of the extraneous characters may be products of her imagination, but they give depth and color to the story.

I chose This Road We Traveled simply because it gives a firsthand look at traveling the Oregon Trail. Last year, my husband and I took a road trip to follow the Oregon Trail and saw many of the same things that Tabby and her family saw. While ours was a car trip, the landscape and scenery was pretty much the same.

Throughout the book Tabatha Moffatt Brown is writing her memoirs as a way to appease her granddaughter and as a way to remember how far she'd come in her life. Her son, Orus, decided to move to the Oregon Territory, but he wants Tabby to stay behind. Tabby is a strong woman with strong opinions, strong words, and strong actions, but she uses a lot of her strength to lean on God. Without knowing just how old Tabby was at the time of the trip, I would have placed her age in her mid-seventies, but at the age of sixty-five, she begins campaigning for education for the children of Oregon. Tabby's group suffered the hardships of lack of food, wagon accidents, families being broken up, lack of water, and general fatigue on the way.

This is indeed a five star book with two thumbs up and a trip down the Oregon Trail with a memoir.

My thanks to Revell Publishing for allowing me to read and review this book.