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I love biographical fiction because it sweeps you to a new time and place and it brings you inside the mind and heart of a real person. I know it’s not really what they said or did, but it seems that way.
Jane Kirkpatrick is the best at biographical fiction and has become one of my favorite authors. I read The Daughter’s Walk when it first came out and immediately lent it to my sister-in-law who lived in Mexico at the time. She didn’t have a lot of English books at her fingertips and I knew she’d love this one.
It begins as a story of a mom and daughter walking across America to earn money to save their farm. You can almost feel their pain and terror as they travel over the railroads and support themselves.
As with all biographical fiction, there aren’t happy endings or tidy plot lines all tied up. They fail at their mission to arrive across the USA at the predetermined time and it sets into motion more of Clara and her mother’s problems, adventures and learning. Clara leaves her family and starts her own business which is a feat in itself and full of problems, too.
Ultimately it’s a story of family, forgiveness and discovering who and what is important to you. Again, it’s not neat or tidy and when I think back to how I felt reading the book, sadness and heaviness is my thought–because it’s the real story of real people. My mentor, Jim Wideman says you can learn from anyone’s mistakes, not just your own. That’s one reason I love reading about real people, I can learn from them–their good choices and bad.