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4.5
The westward migration of European immigrants after landing in America is a story often told but ever fresh. The hardships, defeats, triumphs, small joys, indeed the dauntless effort simply to endure, varied from person to person and family to family, but there is a common thread. Whenever we encounter these pioneer stories we are forced to awareness that we today have so much and they had so little. But of course they had indomitable persistent, and they had dreams, and that made all the difference.Beatty's well-told story follows his ancestors from Ireland in the 1770's to Pennsylvania, and on to Ohio, Iowa, and finally to Montana in the mid-20th century. His story is, as he himself notes, a fictional story based on real people, the people of his own family, his own ancestors. But the story speaks directly to all of us, for these people are in some real sense our people.The odyssey of the Beatty family is in some mythic sense the odyssey of every family that comes to America and seeks to carve out whatever it is that, for it, constitutes a few good acres.The story is engaging, the writing easy, the historical detail interesting, the drama muted but evident. One wishes there had been more narrative time for Beatty, so he could have continued his story and his characters even further west. But perhaps that is for another novel. Until then, we can enjoy what the author has given us--and that is a whole lot indeed.
