Dakota Born
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Average rating2
Buffalo Valley, North Dakota. Like so many small Midwest towns, it's dying. Stores are boarded up, sidewalks cracked, houses need a coat of paint. But despite all that, there's a spirit of hope here, of defiance. The people still living in Buffalo Valley are fighting for their town.
Lyndsay Snyder is a newcomer. She's an outsider, even though she spent childhood vacations here. Now she returns to see the family house again, to explore family secrets and to reevaluate her life.
To her own astonishment, she decides to stay, to accept the vacant position of teacher. Her decision marks a new beginning for Buffalo Valley and for Lyndsay, who discovers in this broken little town the love and purpose she's been seeking.
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3 stars for setting (!), 2 stars for characterisation
The best part of this book, which will stick with me, is a view into a world foreign to me: a middle-American farming community, shrinking and in crisis. This sketch of that world was worth the read. The structure of this novel included five or six major sub-plots, setting it up to be a kind of epic series where a cast of dozens is featured over a series of books. I kind of liked this structure compared to the usual romance plot.
This is my first Macomber–can that really be so since she's apparently written ten thousand million books? I doubt I'll seek her out again because I found the setting more compelling than the characters! Apparently there's a kind of Dakota farmer version of macho and alpha, where prideful, stubborn, and utterly emotionally unintelligent passes for sexy and compelling. Seriously, men of the Dakotas: listen before you jump to conclusions! Make “I” statements! Assume the best, not the worst! Learn to fight fair! Communication is sexy too! Apparently I've got to much California or whatever in me because a marriage proposal that includes calling someone foolish and stubborn leaves me cold.
Quibble: I'm a teacher. I have taught in a one-room multi-grade schoolhouse in a new town with a challenging climate. I did not manage to single-handedly save a dying town and renovate a theatre in my spare time while writing and producing a play. All I managed to do–just barely–is hold on to my sanity, and I'd been teaching for a decade. Props to our main character, the Disney princess version of the first-year teacher. I kept thinking, “what are they doing in a pre-internet world for multi-level mathematics instruction? How has she manged to set up the day curriculum wise? How is her ten-year-old minor in education and subsequent low-level job prepared her to teach high school science to kids in four grade levels???”
