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Laura's Shadow, a Doors to the Past Dual Timeline Novel from Barbour Publishing.

About This Book:

Family Secrets Spill One Conversation at a Time
Visit historic American landmarks through the Doors to the Past series. History and today collide in stories full of mystery, intrigue, faith, and romance.

De Smet, South Dakota—1890
Young women growing up in DeSmet live by two rules: don’t go out in a snowstorm and don’t give your heart to Cap Garland. Young Mariah Patterson only managed to obey one. Orphaned and having devoted her youth to scrapping out a life with her brother Charles, Mariah finds herself with no interesting suitors or means of support. Throwing caution to the wind, she seizes an opportunity to lay her feelings at Cap’s feet, even though she knows Cap sees the world through the torch he carries for Laura Ingalls. Mariah is certain her love for Cap will be strong enough to break both bonds, and she’s willing to risk everything to prove it.

De Smet, South Dakota—1974
Trixie Gowan is the fourth generation of living Gowan women residing in the sprawling farmhouse on the outskirts of De Smet. Well, former resident. She’s recently moved to Minneapolis, where she writes ads for a neighborhood paper edited by Ron Tumble. She might live and work in the city, but her co-workers still call her Prairie Girl. Thus the inspiration for her comic strip—“Lost Laura”—in which a bespectacled girl in a calico dress tries to make her way in the city. The name is a quiet rebellion having grown up in a household where she’d been forbidden to mention the name, Laura Ingalls. But when her great-grandmother Mariah’s declining health brings Trixie home for a visit, two things might just keep her there: the bedside manner of Dr. Campbell Carter and the family secret that seems to be spilling from GG’s lips one conversation at a time.

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MY REVIEW: ★★★/5

As someone who grew up loving Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie and corresponding novels, this newest release from Barbour Publishing intrigued me! As I dove into this novel, author Allison Pittman entranced me with a slow burn style novel full of deep, dark secrets and a gritty, compelling family history.

Highlights:

Strong Female Characters
A Hint of Romance
A Familial Bond
Dual Stories Set in 1970’s and the 1890’s.
A Deep, Dark Secret
Little House on the Prairie Inspired

What I liked:

This novel really surprised me. Having read The Lady in Residence by Allison Pittman, I knew to expect a darker, more sinister story than what the synopsis leads you to believe. She has a style of writing that delivers strong, yet dare I say quirky, female characters and a hint of a more gritty feel than other authors in this genre. Pittman’s characters are often “outside-the-box” characters who surprise a reader and I enjoy that immensely.

I loved Trixie and her “can-do” attitude. I enjoyed her relationship with her cat, her boss and her family as well as her career. She made me smile and without giving away too much of the story, she intrigued me. I enjoyed her story being set in the late 1970’s, a time when women’s liberation and feminism was at the core of many topics, which is a time frame not often found in the genres of clean fiction I usually read. Trixie’s story offers the slightest hint of romance in this novel that was a lovely extra layer.

Mariah’s story was much different for me. It most certainly was not what I expected but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it kept me engrossed in the novel, wanting to know how her story would unfold. While somewhat predictable, I found Mariah to be a character who brought me sadness; that is to say, I empathized with her - both for her plight in life and her loneliness. Her redemption in this story was rewarding.

Summary:

A bit of a slow burn style story… Dark secrets are revealed a little at time. Pittman does a bit of “name dropping”, borrowing information and characters from Wilder’s books while mentioning the beloved stories time and again. This story, while clean, held a surprising event that made this novel border on the edge of inspirational fiction (see notes below regarding content). There were little to no Christian elements and the story read like a secular novel.

P.S. I enjoyed listening to this book as an audiobook as well and thought the narrator did a great job.

Content Note for Sensitive Readers: This story contains a lightly-detailed, consensual, fade to black sexual encounter outside of wedlock.