Have you ever gone to a restaurant, eagerly anticipated a delicious meal of, let’s say, linguine with white clam sauce, only to take one bite and know that something is just not quite right. You can’t pinpoint it exactly, but the taste is just a little bit off. This is the feeling I had for the first seventy something pages of One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus.
As described by Booklist, One Thousand White Women is an American western with a most unusual twist, this is an imaginative fictional account of the participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial “Brides for Indians” program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program intended to instruct “savages” in the ways of civilization and to assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring of these unions. May’s personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the white man’s civilization.
Mailed to me by my girlfriend Ariel with high marks, then recommended by two women in my book club (and picked for our September book), I was anxious to dive right in. To be honest, after about fifty pages I was ready to send this pasta dish back to the kitchen, ala Gordon Ramsey. But my sense of duty told me that I better finish this one up so I can at least discuss it with the other ladies when our club meets.
But then something changed. The book, which in the beginning bored me to tears, got going with a little gusto and I am happy to say that the last 3/4 of it made up for the rough beginning. With enough hair-raising action and a story line that move a bit more quickly, I was glad that I stuck with it and found out what happened to May Dodd.
All in all not a great read, but entertaining in the end.
