Aundy (Pendleton Petticoats, #1)

Shanna
Hatfield
Genre: 
Historical

It is with desperate hope that Aundy Thorsen responds to a mail-order bride newspaper ad.  She agrees to travel to Pendleton, Oregon, and marry Erik Erikson sight unseen.  Although love isn't part of the newly married couple's wedded bliss, things change when tragedy strikes, making Mrs. Erikson a widow. It isn't until after the accident that Aundy meets Garrett Nash, a good looking and kind neighbor. Sparks, the type of which Aundy promised herself would never exist in her life, start to fly.  

Shanna Hatfield writes a story that is reminiscent of the era captured by Bonanza and The Virginian, complete with the conflict between cattleman and those daring to raise sheep. But her description of the day, 1899 by the author's notation on the first page of her novel, feels more like life on a farm in the nineteen twenties and thirties without the advent of Henry Ford's horseless carriage. The conveniences she includes as day-to-day typical machinations, such as telephones and indoor plumbing on a rural farm may have been the norms in a large city such as Chicago, but not the struggling farms of the frontier. She also paints money as an easily obtained tool rather than the more prized measure of economic success generally valued by farmers on the frontier.  A fair treatment of the "mail order bride" trope popular in Americana, "Aundy" is a decent read for those who aren't sticklers for facts of the time period.

 

Shaunna Gonzales