It's been so long since I've read a western that I'd forgotten how exciting they can be. Even though I haven't read a bunch of books in this genre, I've never read one with a female protagonist. For this reason, I was particularly curious.

School teacher Kathleen O'Dwyer sets off on a wagon train heading to New Mexico but later ends up traveling with a mountaineer named James Colter. Though ambivalent of his character, Kathleen finds herself drawn to him. Together they go forth on a number of adventures from the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains. Along the way, they encounter a mix of people, such as fellow travelers, Native American tribesmen, and missionaries.

The book has a lot of action (and occasionally violence), however, there is also a more character-driven side to it. The latter was my favorite part of the story. I liked Kathleen even though I couldn't personally relate much to her. Well-written and keeping a good pace, The Strange Courtship of Kathleen O'Dwyer is a nice read. Unfortunately, the ending is awfully abrupt despite the satisfying conclusion. I did a double-take when I reached the acknowledgments page. It's an otherwise rich story for being under 250 pages. I enjoyed it.

A huge thanks to the author for reaching out and sending me a free digital ARC to read and review! ( )

A historical novel set in the Old West, The Strange Courtship of Kathleen O'Dwyer is in no way an American cowboy saga or tale of pioneers. Kathleen O'Dwyer, the daughter of Irish immigrants, becomes a school teacher, determined to escape the fate of wife and mother. She steadily moves west from Boston to Kansas City, and when offered a position in Santa Fe, NM, eagerly joins the trader's wagon-train journey through Texas to New Mexico and eventually into the Rocky Mountains.

This is not the American West. It is 1828, long before the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 when the United States claimed the area. The land belongs to the Comanches, Apaches, Tewa, other Native tribes, and Spanish missionaries and soldiers from Mexico. Mountain men who have roamed and hunted the area trading for pelts, know the territory better than anyone but the Natives. These are the peoples Kathleen encounters and interacts with -- Temple seems to know them well, as he does the landscape. I was particularly struck by the description of the Pueblo in Taos where Kathleen teaches the Tewa children -- perhaps because I have been there, and the landscape has changed little.

There is a definite episodic quality to Kathleen's journey, and it would make a terrific TV mini-series. Take note producers at Netflix and Prime! ( )

At first The Strange Courtship of Kathleen O'Dwyer seems like an old-fashioned Western, with its band of miscreant mountain men and incidental teamsters loosely led by an over-optimistic St. Louis businessman, a group that includes a spirited Irish-American schoolteacher, the sole female on what ends up as an ill-fated journey on the Santa Fe Trail. So far this could be the plot of at least a few Westerns, but keep reading. Temple’s novel isn’t your great-grandfather’s Zane Gray or your grandfather’s Louis L’Amour. It goes deeper psychologically and farther geographically than the everyday Western, with just as much action and narrative propulsion.

It's on the Santa Fe trail that Kathleen O’Dwyer meets James Colter, an enigmatic Easterner who has been around the West long enough to use brutality when necessary, but who has retained something of a moral compass. As the novel makes increasingly clear, this is not easy to do on the 1823 frontier. In comparison to the men around him, Colter is both competent and measured, as well as mysterious. And thus Kathleen’s strange courtship begins, over vast distances and long stretches of time.

The storyline moves through three locales: the Great Plains, New Mexico, and the high Rockies.

It’s in the third section set in the Rockies that the novel’s major theme fully emerges: the literal lengths to which people will go for a chance at love, given even the faintest odds. But bear in mind that this is a strange courtship. By the time Kathleen reaches the high Rockies, she’s not the same Kathleen who set out on the Santa Fe trail and the love she’s dreamed of is not the love she finds.

If there is any drawback to The Strange Courtship, it’s that it ends too abruptly. But this is a normal feeling when a story has you in its grip and you’re not ready for it to let you go. ( )