Natalee Caple imaginatively reinvents the life of the notorious frontierswoman Calamity Jane with In Calamity's Wake. The novel, set in the late 1800s, opens with a deathbed scene between Miette and her adopted, gravely ill father, a clergyman, who makes his daughter promise that, upon his passing, she will go in search of her birth mother, Martha Jane Canary, aka Calamity Jane, who abandoned Miette when she was just a baby.
With great reluctance, Miette sets off to fulfill her father's wish. Miette's adventures during her long, arduous journey through the badlands of the American West test her in mind, body and soul. She encounters real and imagined dangers and a cast of historical characters who claim to know her mother and shed light, sometimes falsely, into the reputation of the woman known as Calamity Jane. Will Miette be able to track her mother down? If she does, can the breach of mother-daughter estrangement be reconciled?
This slender, inventive book is structured in compact chapters with alternating points of view that are ultimately braided together. Caple's approach enhances the overall suspense and appeal of the narrative whose unifying theme is loneliness. Miette's story is about a young woman's emotional coming-of-age and self-discovery, while the chapters on Calamity Jane's life, rendered via facts and shrouded mystery, flesh out a vivid portrait of the often misunderstood woman behind an American icon. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines