Buffalo Flats
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A stubborn, irreverent and resourceful young woman discovers that it is the bonds of family, faith and friendship that will tie her to the wild and unpredictable land she comes to love so fiercely.
Seventeen-year-old Rebecca has traveled by covered wagon from Utah to the North-West Territories of Canada, where her parents and brothers are now homesteading and establishing a new community. Despite the back-breaking work, Rebecca decides that she, too, must have her own land. She sets to the seemingly impossible task of earning enough money to buy her homestead, while surviving the relentless challenges of pioneer life – the ones that mother nature throws at her in the form of blizzards, grizzlies, influenza or flood, and the ones that come with human nature, be they government bureaucracy, exasperating neighbours or the breathtaking frailty of life.
All the while, her quest opens a floodgate of questions. Why should she be expected to marry and be subject to her husband’s domain? What kind of a man would she marry, anyway? Someone gallant and exciting like Levi Hunt? Or a man of ideas like Coby Webster? How can she make this land she loves her own?
Key Text Features
biographical note
chapters
epigraph
historical note
timeline
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Canadian homesteader's daughter carves out a place for her feminist dreams within her 1890s Latter-Day Saints community in this enticing historical novel based on the lived histories of the author's ancestors, as detailed in an end note. Seventeen-year-old Rebecca Leavitt believes that God has sent her a sign when she discovers an unoccupied piece of land overlooking the Rockies. Though homesteading laws forbid her from owning property, she resolves to one day raise enough money so that her father can purchase the plot and sign it over to her. Her timeline is expedited, however, when she learns that, a year from now, the land will be sold to her childhood friend, Coby Webster. This episodic narrative, told over the course of a year, exposes complex layers in Rebecca's history with Coby and explores women's agency in their patriarchal community. Through deliberately paced, relationship-driven storytelling overflowing with witty humor and gritty Western imagery, Leavitt (Calvin) presents Rebecca's faith as a tender, sometimes fraught, ever-evolving dynamic that honors those struggling to define themselves within religious traditions. A plotline detailing a physically abusive relationship is conscientiously handled. All characters read as white. Ages 12–up.
