A Bride in the Bargain

On the east coast, then around the horn to the west coast this book spans the United States shortly after the Civil War. Being a southern girl through and through it was interesting for me to really feel for a character who could not be more devoted to her Union ties. Starting with nothing but loss and a past that is haunted by guilt not earned our heroine learns to get up and go on with life. The matter is she has to open her life to where God leads and not to where she is determined to be. Our hero is set and knows what he wants, but does not necessarily like what he has to do to get it. Until he accepts his fate and realizes that quite possibly God has a better plan that he. A bargain is made and if all goes well there might be a bride, but which one and will it be in time for everything else to be saved?

The preface of the book is set on a historically accurate fact that a man did take it upon himself to go to the east coast to find wives (orphans - not in the children sense you think of, but girls old enough to marry with no family or other options and widows - women who were left alone with either children or not after the Civil War stole them of their husbands) for the men on the west coast. If you've read much historical fiction, you know many men went west for the land, the mining, and this case the lumberjacking as well. The man who was the “entrepreneur” was not an honest man, but he was not evil in the sense of some characters as well. He was just a man who did not always tell the whole truth.

Other than just knowing that the women who were invited to participate in the exodus were from categories such as widows and orphans, there is no real emphasis on the fact or details of the past lives. So there is no dwelling sadness there as one might assume.

In a way, I would very much relate a partial idea of the story to “A Bride Most Begrudging”. The location is completely different. The characters are completely different. The plot is completely different. But in a similar fashion there is a woman who the last thing on her mind was getting married, who finds out that it might not be up to her with her plans of what she once thought.

How does that sound?

While certain aspects of this book do grow repetitive, they're written in such a way that doesn't feel like the author is just copy+pasting to make the book longer (other than in one spot, Joe says the exact same sentence twice, which is weird).
I was surprised by the other reviews - I didn't realize this was supposed to be “Christian fiction”? The characters are Christians, but it's not like it's unusual for white people in 1866 to believe in God or anything. Anna (the female lead) is of course concerned with her reputation, given the time period. It would've been nice to see a bit of expansion on Joe's assurances that basically nobody cares about things like that in town. They say it a couple times but it doesn't really come up at all - the handful of female characters don't comment one way or the other, and the men are just happy that there's an attractive single woman in town, so there's really no discussion about impropriety or reputations at all beyond Joe saying that nobody cares.

This was a very quick read, and I liked that the book wasn't just one extremely long sustained misunderstanding with everything getting wrapped up 3 pages from the end. Oddly, one of the most enjoyable aspects was the author's note at the end - Ms. Gist's very lighthearted and frank explanations about basically fibbing some historical facts to make the story work better and to keep her work from being repetitive (specifically mentioning that she didn't want to include yet another July 4th celebration even though it would've been historically accurate) were written in a very delightful manner.

My main complaint is all the rain. Of course I don't know what weather was like in Seattle in the 1860s, but thunderstorms in Seattle today are pretty rare - I believe there were two last year and that was very unusual - and yet it always seems to be thunderstorming in this book.

3.5 stars.
I have mixed feelings about this one. I really enjoyed the characters and the story, but I found some issues with the details...especially how much focus there was on physical attraction. There's more to true love than mere physical attraction, and it would be very nice for there to have been more exploration of the personality also. After all, Anna is terrified of someone who'd been abusive, so it would have been nice to see exactly how she realized this guy wasn't the abusive type at all...the handling of this came out a bit too simplistic. It had a lot of potential to be much deeper, and it just didn't quite make it.