"Everything She Didn't Say" by Jane Kirkpatrick

Eva Schon has such good taste in books.  And she's so good at figuring out what I will like.  While I didn't love this as much as the last book she gave me, I still enjoyed it so much, I devoured it in three days.  Though partly that's because my kids finished their school year last week, so now I have more reading (and blogging) time, and I spent a big chunk of Monday reading this while my kids played and played and played.

Anyway.  This is a cool bit of fictionalized biography.  It centers around a real person, Carrie "Dell" Strahorn, who wrote a memoir called Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage in the early 1900s that detailed her life travelling the country with her railroad-promoter husband.  That book is now on my TBR list, as the excerpts included at the end of every chapter in this book were really intriguing.  

What Jane Kirkpatrick does in this book is imagine all the things Strahorn DIDN'T put in her memoir.  She fills in the gaps, as it were, with the not-so-shiny, not-so-happy parts of life.  She takes clues from both Carrie Strahorn's memoir and that of her husband, plus from several biographies, and weaves them together to build a plausible, if fictionalized, portrait of a woman travelling all over North America in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  What her emotions might be, what her spiritual life might be like, what her marriage might have been like inside, and so on.

Now, you know that I love both nonfiction and fiction about pioneers and the Old West.  So I'm basically the exact audience this book is aimed for.  And I definitely enjoyed it.  But I must admit I didn't love it.  Partly that's because Carrie Strahorn was... not exactly someone I could be friends with in real life, I think.  Maybe because she's a lot like me?  Secretive, often putting a bright face on over a bad feeling, and generally taking a very long time to let people in.  

Also, I felt like Strahorn's faith was sort of... an afterthought?  Like, kind of injected here and there when there was a moment, but not an integral part of her life?  This is something I struggle SO MUCH with as a writer, because I can't stand preachy books and refuse to write them, but I also don't like books where a person's faith and beliefs aren't intertwined in their lives, either.  Because that's what real life as a Christian is like -- I don't sit around all day thinking about Jesus and reciting hymns, but my faith permeates my daily life in little ways.  Praying before meals.  Teaching hymns to my kids as part of school.  Reading a devotion while I brush my teeth.  Doing family devotions in the evening.  Praying with my kids when I tuck them into bed.  Studying the lesson I'll be teaching to my Sunday school kids.  Searching for just the right Bible passage for a particular scene in a book I'm writing.  Praying little prayers throughout the day when I need patience or wisdom, when I'm grateful for a blessing, when I'm worried about something, when I see an ambulance or firetruck and ask God to bless them and the people they're going to help.  And that's what I didn't get during most of this book.  So... I didn't love it because of that, too.

But you know what?  I don't have to love every book.  Totally okay to just like some.  Right?  Right.  So we'll say this was a sold "liked it" and go with that.  I did enjoy Kirkpatrick's writing style overall, and I'd like to read something else by her sometime.

Particularly Good Bits:  

I missed my hometown.  But then, I often longed for where I'd been and where I wasn't.  It was a lesson of living I hadn't yet learned about, finding the blessings of each moment (p. 22).

What I really longed for was purposeful activity.  A life without a purpose is a story without an ending (p. 66).

True pioneering requires staying through the hard times, not just flourishing through the joy of new beginnings.  It's thriving during the muddle in the middle that marks a strong character (p. 242).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for some danger and hardship, and because it does discuss things like a woman's monthly cycle and a couple's attempts to conceive a child, though both are handled tastefully and somewhat obliquely.