Waltz on the Big Meadow - Dorothy A. Bell

It's 1897, an abandoned wife and mother with a rebellious teenage daughter faces a dilemma: how to earn enough cash for food and upkeep, and maintain respectability? The gossips would have it that her laundry business is a sham. She's too friendly with her customers at the local bordello and the men at the logging camp. When she takes in a border, a doctor, who arrives without his bride, tongues really start to wag. There is a second chance for love, but it's fraught with obstacles and heartache.

Widowed laundress gets second chance at love and life.

My Review

What a read! I didn't really know what to expect with this one. Yes, there's romance, but that isn't really what this book is about. Or at least, it wasn't the biggest part of it for me. I love history, and books, like this one, that take you back to a particular time. I don't know a great deal about America in the late 1800s. But from the first page of this book I was there.

I think that what I loved most about this book was the women. The pages are populated with such interestingly drawn characters. Women who are finding their way in what was very much a man's world. Women who could find themselves shunned by society if they acted in the wrong way. I felt for both Odessa and her mother Irene as they tried to navigate life. Abandoned by her husband, Irene has few options open to her, but with heart and drive, she manages to make her way in life as the story unfolds.

I was gripped by this story. Grateful that life is so very different for me and my girls. As is often the case, when we think of life being simpler in the past, it often is, but at the cost of women. There is romance here, but it isn't a defining moment for Irene. She doesn't need it, as for her daughter, in many ways she would have been better off without romance.

This was a fantastic read and one that will stay with me for quite some time. 

Author Bio

Married going on sixty years, yes, to the same sweet fella. Moved, relocated at least that many times over the years, but always end up back in Oregon. I was born in Burlington, Iowa but my dad had itchy feet and moved me, my sister and mother to a small town in the Willamette Valley of Oregon when I was ten. And that's when I first met my future spouse in the sixth grade. I've been a store clerk, a meat wrapper, sausage and hamburger grinder, I've put the center stick in kites, pumped gas, and for 18 years I was an aquatic exercise instructor. Love, love working out in the water. Highly recommend a water workout. While doing all of that, I wrote, read, and wrote some more and finally, after many tries and a lot of sell-education on the craft of writing a good story, I was first published in 2014 with my first Oregon Historical fiction romance. I have had a dozen novels published with royalty paying publishers. Ten of which are no longer with a publisher, but I have the rights, and they are in e-book compatible format for any who are interested. Check me out at my blog at https://dabellm3.wordpress.com.