This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Free Book Program, which is open to all readers and is completely free. The author will provide you with a free copy of their book in exchange for an honest review. You and the author will discuss what sites you will post your review to and what kind of copy of the book you would like to receive (eBook, PDF, Word, paperback, etc.). To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email.
Hello, I hope that each of you will have a copy of my book in your hand soon. It has always been a dream of mine to write and with that comes the insatiable desire to have someone read what you have written. My excitement with writing each word is coupled with the feeling that I just can't wait for you to absorb the plot or find out the mysteries and that you can't put it down because you just can't wait to get to the ending!
My personal life consists of a husband, three children and three grandchildren whom I spend as much time with as possible. The bonds you create with family sustains you throughout all aspects of your life and give you reason to be a good person.
In addition to being an author I also am a legal assistant part time and have been for 2o+ years. I enjoy that and I believe it helped me in my writing to have read and written legal documents. It also helps to have a support group in your life, and those that I work with provide that.
My youngest daughter, her daughter, a cousin and several friends accompany me on sales events and will brag me up and wave around a copy of the book to get peoples attention. It is amazing to me that they are so proud of me in this accomplishment. And from time to time we all need that.
I hope that you will give a first time author a chance and read what she has created for you.
Reviewed by Alice DiNizo for Readers' Favorite
It is 1935, and Josie, narrator of Acres of Bitterness, has suffered the death of her beloved husband, Allen. She decides to travel from where she now lives in North Dakota back to Riggins, Idaho, and her old home on Allison Creek. Josie's mother is Nez Perce, of the Blue Dove tribe, and her father is French Canadian. Thirty years before, in 1905, Josie, her parents and her maternal Nez Perce grandparents fled from Riggins lest the U. S. Army force Josie and all her Nez Perce relatives to live on the humiliating confines of a designated reservation. Josie is deathly ill, comatose, from smallpox as they flee. She recovers and asks her parents and grandfather about the nightmares she suffers from, the flashes that come to her of people and places from when she was young. They assure her that she is just suffering the effects of her illness. Now, in 1935, Josie arrives back in Riggins only to find that the local people seem to be hiding something from her. Then Josie learns that long ago her mother was brutally beaten by a man, and that she has a twin sister and a love, Robert Ray Mon, from those distant years of her youth. Will Josie find out what information her parents and grandparents were withholding from her all those long years ago?
Author Debra Patrow has crafted two fascinating stories: one of the Nez Perce's humiliating, cruel treatment by the U. S. Army in the years following the Civil War; the other story that of the star-crossed love between Josie and Robert Ray Mon. She needs to merge these two great stories, for after her retelling of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce's sufferings, she introduces the love story of Robert and Josie, which should have been hinted at rather clearly in some way earlier in the story. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation need some attention, as does the story's jumping from one time period to another without clear designation in the chapter's title.
