Week 15--Low Media--Wednesday Lunch Break

This book is hilarious!  I stayed up reading until 2 am and laughed heartily several times at the razor-sharp witty humor displayed by the main character.  My poor husband probably wondered what on earth I was doing downstairs.  I love to read a good novel, nothing like it.

I'm about a third of the way through the novel of the diary entries of this fictional character, May Dodd, who is journaling her travails as a pseudo mail-order bride.  In the novel's setting, she is an admitted asylum patient who has volunteered to be a bride-gift to the Cheyenne tribe circa 1875 as a means to quell the uprising post Civil War.  Of course she is no where near clinically insane, but volunteered as a means to escape the hell of the ward.  Her snobby family had her admitted because she chose to live out of wedlock and bear children-- labeled as "promiscuous" and therefore shunned by Victorian society.     

What I like about this novel is that the premise is based on an historical event:  Little Wolf, the chief of the Cheyenne Nation visited President Ulysses S. Grant and made a request for 1000 white women in exchange for 1000 horses as a means to assimilate with the white man and stop the bloodshed on the American Plains.  I don't believe I would desire to be traded for a horse; however, given the fictional circumstances of the novel, perhaps it would be worth the freedom.

Image 1:  Little Wolf at Fort Laramie, 1868