No Going Back
Norah Griggs & Barbara Paulson
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 Winterwolf Publishing
ISBN: 0976247194

In newly-settled Nebraska around 1900, the world revolves around Henry Taylor & his two separate lives. All he ever wanted was to live quietly. Was that so much to ask?

She's running away from her husband into the wilderness along the Missouri river, heading for Oklahoma & her mother's mother, a Cherokee Indian. She's tried it before, with her daughter, except they couldn't get far enough before he found them & made their life hell when he got them back to their isolated cabin in the woods. Now she's alone, traveling at night under a cloudless, moonlit sky, & making good time.

She wakes in the night at home in their small cabin with her Dad, who's been raging ever since her Ma left. Now something is banging around outside & she goes to explore. Finding only a racoon, she wanders down to the river & sits to think about her life & her Ma's letter telling her why she left. Something whacks her upside the head & the next thing she knows, she's prisoner of a group of men.

In the daylight of the next day Henry is stumbling around his property looking for his daughter & remembering all the offenses his worthless wife has committed & the punishment he's going to mete out upon them when he finds them.

No Going Back follows these three, one a mature woman on the run, one a 12 year-old girl dressed like a boy & abducted for ransom, & one a Bible-quoting man struggling to make his fortune, on the hunt to bring back his two uppity females.

Rachel & Tess find new lives & friends, & Henry finds a silver-tongued minister who befriends, counsels... & then swindles him.

“With twists & turns, No Going Back flows with circumstance & happenstance, exploring Native American life & looking at the dark side of organized religion.”

Told in the present tense, & from each of the protagonists' point of view, No Going Back is a lively, if unedited tale of the foundations of domestic abuse, the kindness & deviousness of strangers, awakenings of the heart, coming of age in the wild & woolly West, & the swindlings & violence men brought with them, in the name of fortune & faith.

Why only 2 teapots? Because it's inexpertly written (with anachronisms & repetitions galore -- things a Copy Editor would have caught) from a modern perspective & an overly romantic & simplistic view of the Native American way of life, although it does have an underlying morality theme: of seeking a better life, of walking your talk & of what goes around coming around... to bite you on the you-know-where.

While it wasn't my cup of tea, I know women's reading groups will find a lot to talk about with this one: the quality of marriages, womanly courage, & just desserts.

More from Norah Griggs: Rocklady: The Building of a Labyrinth
(10/23/05)

Rebecca