The Diary of Mattie Spenser (1997)

It took me awhile to warm to this audio, but I ended up so engrossed in the story that I brought the CDs in the house and borrowed my daughter's CD player to keep listening, which I hardly ever do. I enjoy Ms. Dallas's style, and I loved the intimate look into homesteading in Colorado Territory and early Denver history. Mattie receives a diary as a wedding present from her best friend Carrie (not sure about spellings here, as I listened to the audio) before she and her new husband set off from Fort Madison, Iowa to homestead in the vast prairie of the Colorado Territory in 1865. In it, Mattie records the happenings of the difficult, dangerous crossing, the hardships endured in their windswept sod home, the loneliness she suffers with no female friends and few, far-flung neighbors, the hostile, raiding Indians, and the husband she finds so very hard to understand. Life is hard -- there's just no other way to say it. Mattie (and the reader) are left reeling after a series of terrible tragedies, and the will to go on and eke out a life in so inhospitable an environment is truly amazing, for while Mattie and her neighbors are fictional characters, the real homesteaders of the great American prairie surely endured a life equally harsh. The ending surprised me and left me with a kind of bittersweet melancholia.

The one criticism, however, was the audio production. Perhaps a diary is not the best kind of story for an audio. The book started out in a very matter-of-fact diary style, becoming less like a diary and more like a novel as the story went on. The narrator, particularly in early chapters, could have been giving elocution lessons, so expressionless was her performance. I read somewhere that some narrators prefer to record cold, without knowing the story, bringing the newness and freshness to the listening experience. I am in awe of the narrators who operate that way. How can they understand the characters they don't even know? This one really sounded like a cold read, though, and the experience did NOT enhance the listening. At times, the narrator sounded stymied by punctuation.

because there were odd pauses before the "rest" of the sentence. The narrator might have been a super-fluent third grader.

who expected sentences to be over when they were not. It was a huge distraction at first, that became less so.

as I got into the story:)

Really enjoyed this book. it was my first Sandra Dallas book and liked it so much I decided I wanted to read more books by her.
4.5 ( )

Liked the character of Mattie very much, she was spunky and tough, yet really just wanted someone to love her. Life for these early settler was unbelievably hard, the Indians, the lack of resources, but I think mostly it was all the babies dying and the illnesses that had no cure that would have gotten to me the most. They had so little control over anything. Liked that at the end the reader does find out what happened with Mattie and Luke and that Mattie finally seemed to find happiness of a sort. ( )

Told in the form of diary entries, this is the story of Mattie Spenser, who finds herself marrying the most eligible bachelor in Ft. Madison, Iowa and then heading west into the Colorado territory with him. Mattie's diary accurately describes the hardships as well as the joys of homesteading on the western prairies and the camaraderie of a disparate group of neighbors.

As Their first year of homesteading comes to an end, Mattie & Luke decide to celebrate with a week in Denver and it is there that Mattie discovers the sad truth of her husband's real object of affection. In learning to deal with this sad fact of life, she then finds love in a most unexpected corner.

Told with honesty, warmth and humor, this book was a heartwarming read. ( )

Interesting historical read but not very uplifting. ( )