Why did this book not interest me the way it should? I don’t know. Why are railroads so boring?
The Great Railroad Race: The Diary of Libby West, Utah Territory, 1868, Kristiana Gregory, 1999.
As a kid, I thought this book was super boring. As an adult, I like it much more, with a bunch of caveats. I think Kristiana Gregory is a great writer, and she did several Dear America books, but for whatever reason, her trio of books that take place in the American West in the middle of the 19th century (Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie¸ this one, and Seeds of Hope) all have very similar voices. Now, the protagonists of the other two books are cousins, so I suppose it’s forgivable, but for whatever reason it just doesn’t work for me in this book. (Also, notably, Gregory likes to link her books together in-universe, which is why the other two books feature cousins that mention each other. But did you know that in the epilogue to Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie¸ one of Hattie’s granddaughters is mentioned as living through the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906? That is a direct callback to one of Gregory’s earlier books, Earthquake at Dawn, where Daisy Valentine, Hattie’s granddaughter, is the protagonist.) But enough about my creepily obsessive rereading of YA books! (That’s a lie. There can never be enough of that. That’s why this blog exists.)