Olive Collins, The Weaver’s Legacy (2020)
Lucy O’Neill has been adopted by her aunt Goldie, who’d left her a ranch in Four Oaks, Wyoming. Trying to convince her to come back and take possession of her property, her cousin Wilbur Breen informs her of the sudden reappearance of her long-lost father Lorcan.
Lorcan has returned after a 30-year absence, and Lucy goes back to Four Oaks to meet him, hoping to learn the real story of the family’s past. She reminisces with Makawee, the Lakota wife of Goldie’s neighbour, while her husband Harry plots to make sure Lorcan is not there to try to claim the property.
Grainne O’Neill (Goldie) is 9 when she sets off West with a wagon train of Irish Catholic immigrants, each family to claim their 160 acres. Her father Barry is keen to leave everything behind, even their Gaelic language, always ‘clawing for more’. Her brother Lorcan can’t seem to do anything right and is ever thirsty to hear stories about killing Indians. The children make friends with Chaytan, the Lakota boy who tames wild mustangs.
Goldie is fighting with her cousin when the grasshoppers (locusts) invade. When the swarm subsides, her baby sister is gone. Each day she steps farther into the forested hills marked as Indian territory and leaves letters for the Indians she believes have taken her sister.
The immigrant families intermarry, carrying their personalities, their prejudices and their vendettas with them, and the various family histories unravel across the generations.
One challenge in writing family sagas is that most families lead pretty ordinary lives. ‘The story of my grandparents’ is really only interesting enough if they’re your own grandparents. There usually has to be some kind of ‘deep, dark family secret’ or mystery to keep the reader wanting to read through till the end while we work through the generations. In this novel, the two mysteries a) where had Lorcan been and why was he back? and b) what happened to Goldie’s baby sister? are just about enough. There’s also c) an undercurrent that Lorcan may not have been ‘the gentleman that she had been led to believe’.
The initial reveal is a bit clumsy, making me wonder if I’d skipped over a few pages somewhere, but it becomes clear in the end. The final revelation is a shocker that comes too late to avoid the tragedies.
It also helps if a story is set during an eventful historical period. The setting is, interestingly enough, defined as the period of time between two great natural disasters—the 1866 Grasshopper Invasion and the 1933 Dust Bowl.
Tx to JM, who gave me this book for my birthday.
Susie Helme 