Sandra Dallas's Westering Women is an absorbing read, even though the book has some shortcomings. The premise - that 50 women have been recruited to head California via the Overland Trail to find husbands - is itself a bit farfetched, but it works to get the narrative underway and tell a story of female bonding under extreme conditions. The trip is advertised as a way to spread morality among the men in mining camps. The women who are on the trip are not as much interested in finding husbands as getting away from bad situations at home. The characters are all extremes - brutalized, noble, or evil - so there is not a great deal of subtlety. As the author says in her acknowledgements, so many of the men are bad and there is a lot of melodrama.
That being said, I still enjoyed reading Westering Women despite its faults. The story of these women undergoing the hardships of the Overland Trail is pretty compelling.
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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