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Every life is a story, but it takes an excellent storyteller to make the journey of a lifetime memorable. Fortunately, author Hoseley is such a storyteller. Her life of the indefatigable Susan is a trip you’ll remember for some time.
The year is 1910 and the setting is a prairie farm in Idaho. Writing in Susan’s voice, with prose and dialogue that is admiringly restrained yet unflinchingly descriptive, we share Susan’s life with her mother, father, older brother and younger sister. The mother is an older, colder woman. The father is more demonstrative and understanding. Hoseley imbues each of these characters and those that follow with a plainspoken honesty. No false notes or overwriting turn them from characters to caricatures.
The plot is disarmingly straightforward. It is simply Susan’s life filled with joy, sorrow, accomplishment, disappointment, fear, heartache, love, loss, rebirth, and more. While anchored in Idaho, the story spans from the plains to the mountains and from the farms to the cities. It involves her with people who are good, bad, weak, strong, selfish, and loving. Most of all, it shows us a woman bowed but never broken, and staggered but never beaten when times are hard, conditions harsh, and life seems more a burden than a gift.
There is a constant in Susan’s story, as well. It is her deep and abiding belief in God. A belief that helps see her and her loved ones through the most difficult of days. Infused throughout the narrative, it neither proselytizes nor moralizes. It simply provides a source of strength for Susan, and, perhaps, for readers, too.