Early Review: Springsweet

The Springsweet
by Saundra Mitchell
releases 4.17.2012
Harcourt Press

My Thoughts On:
Springsweet picks up after The Vespertine left us with Zora's heartbreak sending her into solitude, and a future none to bright. There are no bright parties or full dance cards for Zora these days, the most she finds herself leaving the house is to stop by Nathaniel's grave. On a whim Zora decides to scandalize herself at a party giving her mother the means to sent her away to an Aunt out in the West. Zora believes that this will give her a new fresh look in life away from her memories and her past in the city and onto something different. What Zora soon finds is that the homesteading is far from what is written about in books and papers and the plains if less forgiving than steel. With suitors coming to her door, and a newly found power rising up from below, Zora soon becomes a dangerous commodity in a poor struggling community.

Springsweet with delight readers with a tale of love lost and learned while at the same time taking us back into the Wild West and the struggles people faced as they tried to dig out a future in the untamed land. Saundra Mitchell really wrote a story that evokes hints of the past in readers and will keep them through the very last page.

Book Blurb from the Publisher:

It’s a long way from Baltimore to Oklahoma Territory. But Zora Stewart will go any distance to put the tragic events of her sixteenth summer behind her. So this city girl heads to the tiny frontier town of West Glory to help her young widowed aunt keep her homestead going.When another Baltimorean shows up in West Glory, Zora couldn’t be more surprised. Theo de la Croix made the long trip out west hoping to court Zora, whom he has long admired from afar.But Zora has developed an attraction to a rather less respectable fellow: Emerson Birch, a rough-mannered young "sooner" whose fertile land is coveted.As Zora begins to suspect that there may be more than luck behind Emerson’s good land, she discovers an extraordinary, astonishing power of her own: the ability to sense water under the parched earth. When her aunt hires her out as a "springsweet" to advise other settlers where to dig their wells, Zora feels the burden of holding the key to something so essential to survival in this unforgiving land.Even more, she finds herself longing for love the way the prairie thirsts for water. Maybe, in the wildness of the territories, Zora can finally move beyond simply surviving and start living.

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