Enslaved by a Pawnee to settle one of her father's bets, 12-year-old Harriet clings to the promise of someday being reunited with her family. Ankles hobbled, she is forced into hard labor, biding her time until she realizes freedom will come only with escape, which she finally is able to accomplish.
Harriet's journey across the Great Plains during the Civil War years is neither romantic nor gratuitously violent; it is simply her reality, from hungry nights alone to run-ins with soldiers and chance meetings with other wanderers. Although quick thinking and a level head serve Harriet well, 19th-century Nebraska offers no safe haven.
The American West of Bohemian Girl, Teresa Svoboda's second novel in the University of Nebraska's Flyover Fiction series, is both harsher and more ordinary than that portrayed by Hollywood. Harriet is not caught up in an Indian raid or lured by pimps; instead, she is involved in the more personal conflict of staying alive without losing her "true self." Svoboda (a published poet and winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize) weaves her varied talents into Bohemian Girl, infusing her prose with poetry and her fiction with truth. From the first page, readers will be drawn to Harriet's perspective ("If I look into the perfect face of the river, with no rock to make a muscle in its flow or tree stump to divide it, I see Pa in it") and will later marvel that even after years of sacrifice she can still pause to watch the "quail skitter up in the new evening-pale light" along the river. --Candace B. Levy, freelance editor blogging at Beth Fish Reads