Backwards To Oregon, by Jaee

Backwards To Oregon

Jae

Rebiew originally publilshed in Bosom Friends: lesbian historical Fiction.
Luke Hamilton is a woman living as a man. S/he has just left the army to head down the Oregon Trail with a wagon train and claim the land the territory will give any man… and notice I said "man"... so s/he can begin a horse farm. S/he meets and asks a prostitute named Nora to marry him... her.. oh heck, let’s just stick to the biological. Her. Though I admit I don’t much like calling Luke what she would not call herself.. him.

Nora accepts Luke’s proposal not knowing Luke is a woman. How this is possible is that Luke from the start tells her she is proposing only a business partnership, not a real marriage with conjugal rights and all that. She explains she needs someone to help out with the wagon, though her real reason is that having a wife and child, Nora’s daughter Amy, helps her maintain her cover of being a man.

Most of the novel is about the journey and the negotiations Luke and Nora make between them to live harmoniously together. I don’t think it's much of a spoiler to say that Nora does eventually find out Luke is a woman, so the question changes from “Will she find out?” to “What will she do about it?” When Nora turns out to be pregnant by one of her brothel customers the plot just thickens, though for the two women it is less of an issue than Luke’s obvious growing attraction to Nora.

The story is told in a combination of short vignettes and more involved subplots along the Oregon Trail. You can almost see a list of the possible plot twists of any pioneer journey story being checked off: a child’s illness, a life-threatening accident , fear of Indians, tensions within the wagon train, childbirth in the wild, deprivation, weariness, despondency, hunger and so forth. But it works. Beautifully. It actually made me want to follow the trail myself, to see what they were up against.

Jae, the author, is a psychologist, and she says right off the bat that she writes to explore how individuals grow and overcome fears and learn to trust. You can follow the evolution of Nora and Luke, as well as a couple other characters. This could be tiresome if the characters were standard, but they are not in this novel. Luke is fully realized, complex, credible, appealing, and natural, and so is Nora. You learn why they are the way they are, not only in how their personalities originated but also what influences either helped them or held them back. Luke was on her own from the age of twelve and took on a male identity to survive. There is a wonderful line that says, perhaps not in so many words, that the clothing and personality she has adopted are now the only way she can be herself. That resonated with me since my own Elisabeth says much the same thing in Beloved Pilgrim. Nora was betrayed by a man and thrown out by her parents, needing to fall back on joining a brothel just so she and her daughter would survive. She has had the worst experience of men being exposed only to the worst among them, so it is no wonder she accepts Luke as a means to an end and constantly judges her actions and intentions based on her jaundiced view of men.

This is a love story. It is developed excruciatingly and deliciously slowly. It is easier to understand how Luke comes to love Nora, but how will Nora handle Luke’s being a woman? how can she possibly actually love her.

Another thing I liked about this story is watching how, in their separate ways, Luke and Nora come to an understanding that being female does not mean you are weak. Luke learns about women’s strength by watching the pioneer women work and cope with hardship. Nora is challenged in her assumptions about what it is to be a woman when first Luke treats her with respect and support and then when she discovers this person she thought was a strong man is really a strong woman.

In short, I just loved this novel. It is intelligent, well conceived and developed, full of heart but sparing with sentiment. That English is not Jae’s native language surprised me.. there is no way to tell reading her work. I am so happy to learn that there is a sequel, Hidden Truths. I thank Jae for making sure both books are text to speech enabled on Kindle so I could have the wonderful experience of getting to know and love Luke and Nora.