REVIEW: Softly Falling by Carla Kelly
B- ReviewsAmerican historical / cowboy / Historical / Interracial / POC / teacher / western13 Comments
Lily looked at the vastness of the plains, full of cattle, and then up at the sky without a cloud in sight.
“What’s going to happen, Mr. Sinclair?” she asked. “What do you know?”
Fresh off the train from New York City, Lily Carteret arrives in picturesque Wyoming only to discover that her wayward father has lost his cattle ranch to a lowly cowboy in a card game!
Determined not to let her father’s folly ruin her life, Lily becomes a teacher on the ranch. There she learns that the handsome cowboy, Jack Sinclair, has some wild predictions about the upcoming winter—that it will be unlike anything Wyoming has ever seen. Lily must either cast off her skepticism to work with Jack or risk losing everything she holds dear.
Dear Ms. Kelly,
I’d never heard of Remittance Men until a few years ago when I read the delightful book ‘Proving Herself.” I can’t recall seeing one since then so when I realized this book features one – even in a secondary role – and is one of your frontier westerns, I decided to give it a go.
The story has the usual suspects featured in your books – wounded souls who find each other, buck each other up and rescue each other from slings and arrows of life. It’s definitely an ensemble piece which is nice from the standpoint of lots of secondary characters to care about but the romance gets pushed more to the background until the second half when the snow starts falling and the wind begins howling.
Jack’s main focus is earning his keep as the foreman of a consortium ranch owned by greedy nincompoops who don’t have the intelligence to know one end of a cow from the other. His plan – and you always need a plan – is to breed his Hereford bull to his two tough cows on his tiny 2,000 acre ranch which he won from Lily’s father in a poker game. He’s been down and out, he’s sharecropped on a dirt poor Georgia farm, he’s survived the War of Northern Aggression, he’s started over in Wyoming knowing nothing of cattle ranching but he’s got a plan and no amount of laughter from other ranchers will change it. Jack is caring, intelligent and determined to shepherd his charges – human and bovine – through the tough winter he knows is coming.
Lily is a woman of color who has been taken care of in her Uncle’s house and schooled well but not loved since the death of her mother in Barbados and her father’s exile first to India and then Canada before finally landing in Wyoming. Her Uncle’s pretentious marriage and social aspirations make her continued presence awkward and so, hoping against hope, she sets out for what has been reported as her father’s prosperous ranch. Reality hits her hard but is not unexpected and following Jack’s advice she formulates a plan.
Will both of them survive the winter that arrives even worse than Jack’s pessimistic fears? Can Lily’s father pull himself out of the alcoholism that has wasted his life? And what will be left alive once the snow finally melts in spring?
The obvious highlight of the book will be the terrible winter of 1886/87 yet that doesn’t appear for half the book. Lily’s arrival and introduction to Wyoming and Jack and his bull, then her forays into teaching fill the first part. But for all that – it actually feels like a fairly thin plot when push comes to shove with what seemed like a lot of padding. The pacing is very slow and deliberate. Almost too slow.
One of those slow subplots was about a packrat. I read more than enough about the packrat. No, really .. enough. I’m all for cute animals in books, I love cute animals in books but one more word about this rat was about to send me over the edge.
For all the mentions of Lily’s mixed ethnicity, there were few negative instances where Lily’s background is shown in real time. She mentions the pain and isolation of her heritage during her school days in England and of course that is also the reason her Uncle wanted her to emigrate. One event in the present is more matter of fact while the other is intentionally more venomous but Jack sees off each man during his strong defense of Lily. I had wondered since Jack is a former Confederate if that would be the real stumbling block in the book but he’s poor white trash instead of a plantation owner. I ended up feeling that this aspect of the book was a build up that fizzled out.
Thankfully things picked up once the blizzards slammed into the plains. I’ve read a few other romances set during the winter of 1886/87 and my God what can be said about this? The restrained description of the horror is ghastly and sickening. I can only imagine the full extent of what happened that wasn’t included here. It would undoubtedly give nightmares to anyone who lived through it. It did bring to mind the Maureen O’Hara movie “The Rare Breed.”
The second half of the book was definitely stronger. Danger loomed, death could strike at any moment and the small, ragtag band of people Jack and Lily take charge of have to pull together to survive what Mother Nature hurls at them. Two final plot points are taken care of one of which gives Jack an inventive excuse to propose to this lovely woman whose accent he falls in love with as she reads him “Ivanhoe.” I adore a couple who fall in love over books. I was glad that you didn’t pull any punches with the reality of that horrible winter but wish that the issues raised by Lily’s heritage had been explored more. B-
~Jayne
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Jayne
I read this back in Nov, when it first came out, and had the same quibbles you did. The romance was almost non-existent and her racial heritage played only a small part in the book. I did like that Kelly didn’t pull too many punches about the racial attitudes of the time and place, especially regarding the French/Indian woman who was the cook as well as Lily.
I did like the subtle bits of humor like the matter of the butler’s accent. And I was really happy to be reading this while nice and snug in my well-insulated, centrally heated home.
Glad I’m not the only one who thought of “The Rare Breed”.
I haven’t gone back to re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “The Long Winter”, but I recall that it took place at about the same time. (Thank you, Krakatoa! (which exploded in 1883 and influenced weather for the next half-dozen years or so).)
Anyone else remember the Little House TV show episode where the kids are in the one-room school and then trying to get to a house in the blizzard, and they make a line, and the end of the line is one of the big bearded dads, I think – I forget which one – and he drops off and freezes to death? As the kids are struggling home from school. Am I misremembering? That episode scared me for thirty years – maybe why I moved to the West Coast.
We were living on a farm in 1976/77 and were snowed in for almost 2 weeks – my mother had taken to baking bread (not common in my house) and we were out of even canned fruit cocktail. I remember that last can. The party-line phone had been down for weeks, but finally a neighbor guessed what was going on and brought a snowplow and did our lane and we could get out. Long time ago.
Yes, I now live in a city.
And I think I’ll pass on a terrifying description of the winter of 1886/87. Unless I’m on vacation in Hawaii.
@Barb in Maryland: I think readers would be better served going into it with the idea it’s historical fiction with romance than the other way around.
@Anna Richland: I remember reading 10-15 years ago when some awful storm whipped through eastern Canada and not only brought down power lines but destroyed the electrical poles and transformers thus plunging 1000s of people back to the days of pre-electricity, the people with wood burning stoves were the ones able to heat their homes and cook hot meals for the neighborhood. I think this went on for a couple of weeks before things could be restored to normal. Yeah, I’ll stay somewhere warm during the winter, thanks.
@Jayne: That was in 1998 when a section of southern Quebec and northern New England had freezing rain for five days straight. Ice accumulation reached four inches on the power lines and brought pylons down like a line of dominoes. Some places didn’t have power restored for a month. Our family was fortunate in that my in-laws lived outside the ice storm area and never lost power. My younger daughter was 3 months old at the time, and I didn’t fancy keeping her (or even the older daughter who was 4) in an unheated house for an indefinite amount of time. The drive to the town where my in-laws lived was quite harrowing, though–we didn’t know when any high tension wires might decide to give way and block the road, or fall on us. The normally-forty-minute drive took us three hours.
@Barb in Maryland: Thanks! I hadn’t heard of the Krakatoa link.
Thanks for reviewing, too, Jayne. I’ll read nearly anything of Carla Kelly’s once I know it’s out there, but I think I’ll like this one better for setting my expectations ahead of time. Everyone’s stories of storms are great too.
Does the heroine of the cover art look like the heroine of the story, do you all think?
@Kay: I think the cover model is like Lily is described.
@Ashlyn Macnamara: Okay, *that* would be a harrowing drive. I hope you didn’t lose power for a month.
@Jayne: No, we didn’t live in the hardest hit area. Plus, I live at the very end of town, and the houses on my side of the street actually get their power supply from the next town over. OUR side of the street had lights after about five days or so. The opposite side of the street had to wait at least a week. Ironically, our neighbor across the way–one of the one who had to wait longer–worked for the electric company at the time.
Yes, I could do without the description of a gruelling winter. Six years ago I was visiting my parents in rural Ontario for Christmas when the electricity went out for five days, and the generator ran out of propane. We were snowed in and I had a newborn baby who was in danger of freezing to death–the temperature in the house was literally below freezing. I had her swaddled and in my arms, next to my skin, the entire time and she was still cold. Snowstorms can be terrifying.
I was glad to find this review just after I finished the book. I liked it a bit better than you did, Jayne. In fact, I loved every page – even the pack rat! I love that I can count on Carla Kelly giving me a hero and heroine that are decent, if flawed, people that I can always root for. As far as the first half of the book, I didn’t really mind how long it took to get there. I didn’t want the book to end, and all the time since I finished it I’ve gone back to reread little bits that I loved, particularly towards the end of the book. I was greatly relieved by the final disposition of Luella. (Spoiler warning: I was afraid that she would be forced to leave with her father.)
It did remind me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. I am very grateful to live in California when I read this kind of book! It hadn’t occurred to me that Krakatoa might have played its part in creating the weather. I also really loved the cat. I know Carla Kelly is a cat owner, and her word-picture of a feral cat being gradually tamed (by Lily, of course) was masterful. Also, I kind of fell for Pierre (Lily refuses to call him “Indian”). I’d love to read more about him.
@Kari S.: I hear you on Kelly’s flawed but honest characters. It’s something I look forward to in her books as well. And I also agree on the fate of Luella – that had me worried during the second part of the book. If anyone could pull off a book about Pierre, it would be Carla Kelly.