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Luv the speed w/which I rcd the book. LOVED the book. We read it for book club & couldn't say enough about the women in the book or the author's ability to make us feel right there going thru every joy & sorrow w/them. Touching & uplifting.
Anytime I can still remember a book and its plot after a few weeks, it is worthy of a review, it must be memorable. I read this book a few years ago. It still stands as one of my favorite books of all time. I have to say, you do believe you are there and it could have actually happened. An excellent read.
The heroine always gets the best guy in the story. The book was definitely a page-turner, but more along the lines of a well-written romance novel than anything else. The characters were all cliches, from the plucky, intelligent, young and beautiful heroine (May Dodd) to the Indian chief full of integrity and quiet strength (who naturally picked May to be his bride). It was hard to tell fact from fiction, but in the end it didn't really matter. This is a great book to read at the beach, but doesn't have much more literary value that that.
This in itself would lend itself to a great discussion. But, I was able to look beyond this & focus on the story, which I did enjoy.Ultimately One Thousand Women is a tragic story.
Based on the (true) suggestion of Cheyenne Indians to the US government that 1000 women be given as wives to their young men in order to assimilate and blend the cultures thereby creating peace between them, this novel takes the form of the (fictitious) journals of May Dodd, a young girl who had inappropriately been committed to a mental hospital but was released to be a part of this program.Her writings are not just journals, but also letters never sent but written to various people from her past - including her sister and the father of her two children in the east. While I guess there is an element of "what would you reveal to your sister that you wouldn't a previous lover." this detracts from the format, and so far I feel Fergus would have been better served to have stuck to journals.Toward the end, it did get better.
The subject of this novel is what originally attracted me. It had an "I'm off to summer camp" feel for me.
For one thing, there were more journal entries than letters, and so I was able to give up that irritation. But I never quite got the complete feeling that May was immersed in the tribe.
May is betrayed in some fashion by all three of the men she has loved. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
I love the premise of the story. I love this book.I love the way the book is written. I love the narrator. The characters are very well-drawn. The plot line is fascinating and the book is hard to put down.
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