TUESDAY AFTERNOON BOOK CLUB

When an author writes an award winning novel there is frequently a request for a sequel.  Jim Fergus wrote “One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd” in 1998.  He won several awards for the book and sold over a million copies in the United States and France.  The sequel “The Vengeance of Mothers” was published in 2017.  After reading his first book, the Tuesday Afternoon Book Club chose to read the sequel as their August selection.

The book “the Vengeance of Mothers” picks up where “One Thousand White Women – the Journals of May Dodd” ends.   This book includes journals of Margaret Kelly and Molly Mc Gill.  They were women who participated in the “Brides for Indians” program in 1873.  A program which thought the way to peace between the United States and the Cheyenne Nation was for  ”one thousand white women” to be given in exchange for three hundred horses. Those “brides” were mostly women in insane asylums, prisons, “fallen women” or an occasional adventurer who thought anything was better than their present situation.  No one expected it to work.  The brides themselves thought of it simply as a chance at freedom.  But many of them fell in love with their Cheyenne spouses and had children with them.  Then the soldiers came.

The book explores the bonds between children and mothers, husbands and wives when society does not accept them.  What does it mean to be white, to by Cheyenne,  and how far will they  go to avenge the ones they love?   The book brings to life a time in American History many have forgotten.  It is a book full of adventure.

Check out this book at the LeRoy Public Library.