[issybird]

This could aptly have been titled The Writer of the Purple Prose. In common with those who have posted, I also was surprised at the overwritten descriptions of the scenery and the romantic histrionics. I thought it would be all riding and shooting, although there was a fair amount of that.

It reads like the high-romance novels of a hundred years ago so is obviously typical of its time. Is this what men liked to read? Did they sigh happily when the bold hero was overmastered by passion and grabbed the pure young girl in his strong arms and rained kisses on her blushing face?

It had a lot of surprises that didn't surprise at least the jaundiced 21st-century reader. Bess had to turn out to be the missing girl and been untainted by the touch of man, although Bern had nobly forgiven her. And who didn't know that the rock which had been poised over the pass for a thousand years would come crashing down?

I found the most modern aspect, oddly enough since it seems so un-PC, to be the depiction of what it's like to live in a theocracy. All law and relationships subject to the will of the religious leaders with no check on their actions; religious fanaticism continues to bedevil modern society. I suspect Grey's indictment of Mormonism in the late 18th-century was accurate enough, if one-sided. Interestingly to me, it seems to have been motivated by the excesses in his personal life. A married man, he lived polyamorously with several different women at the same time, even traveling with them. His wife accepted the situation. So it's hard to see his condemnation of Mormonism for its effects on the women as not reflecting a measure of guilt or overwhelming ego or perhaps both.

This was a fun read. It would have gone down more easily without the histrionics and the lush prose, but that's part of the period appeal. I didn't like it enough to make me seek out more Grey; just the same I admit to some curiosity about what happened to Lassiter and Jane. Maybe sometime I'll pick up the sequel.