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57th out of 137 books
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The Diary of Mattie Spenser
No one is more surprised than Mattie Spenser herself when Luke Spenser, considered the great catch of their small Iowa town, asks her to marry him. Less than a month later, they are off in a covered wagon to build a home on the Colorado frontier. Mattie's only company is a slightly mysterious husband and her private journal, where she records the joys and frustrations no...more
Paperback, 240 pages
Published
May 15th 1998
by St. Martin's Griffin
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This book was one that I had a hard time putting down. It was compelling. Mattie's voice rings true. She is someone you like. The story is set in the pioneer days. Mattie and her husband Luke head to the Colorado frontier to build a home and farm. Mattie records her journey, thoughts and life in a journal. Her story is told through this journal.
So often the journals and stories of pioneer women are softened and the difficult times glossed over in favor of espousing faith and hope. W...more
So often the journals and stories of pioneer women are softened and the difficult times glossed over in favor of espousing faith and hope. W...more
I didn't want to put this book down or for it to end. Sandra Dallas combined both a wonderful plot in a fascinating time period with the unique character of Maggie Spenser. I usually do not like books in a diary or letter format b/c there is so much skipping around and it feels like the flow is interrupted. And I sometimes feel that I am missing out on some aspect of the novel, such as setting or other character's personalities. This book proved me wrong. The story flowed so well and through Mat...more
Fran
rated it
Recommends it for:
fans of historical fiction or women's fiction (NOT chick lit)
Recommended to Fran by:
my sister and my daughter
Shelves:
general-fiction,
historical-fiction
A woman purportedly finds a diary tucked into an elderly neighbor's ancestor's trunk. She decides to decipher and transcribe the diary, and the story she uncovers is a fascinating description of life on the American prairie. Some of the adventures, like the accounts of the wagon train and sad lives and deaths of neighbors, are remarkable. The undercurrent of her life with her husband is a heart-breaking story. If you liked Jim Fergus's amazing "One Thousand White Women", you may lik...more
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I was not excited to read this book....but oh, I am so glad I did! This really was a great love story! Mattie sets out with her new husband to start a life in the Colorado Territory. Frontier life in the 1800's doesn't sound like an appealing read, but I need to remember to give things a chance. I was quickly swept up in the trials and bits of happiness that graced Mattie's life. I should have suspected that Sandra Dallas's story would be hightly entertaining. She always makes for a pleasa...more
26 years ago my new husband and I loaded all our possessions in our " wagon" ie the Hertz rental truck and headed to a new land (Florida) to start our married life togerher. This book is about Mattie who heads west to the Colorado territory with her new husband Luke to start her married life. The book tells of the trials and tribulations of traveling to and living out west.It is written as her private diary which is found in present time by her Matties grandaughter's neighbor who ...more
I know there will be some in my book group that won't care for this. It certainly had some elements in it that disappointed me. However, I enjoyed Mattie's story. There was a lot of foreshadowing in the book and I wanted to keep reading to see if things would turn out the way I thought they might or not. Heartbreaking - it had me in tears at the end and had me pondering - what makes a marriage work? I remember my grandparents talking about marriage - these folks were your salt of the earth ...more
Another nice book by Sandra Dallas, but maybe a little more emotionally painful than some of the others. Mattie Spencer is surprised with a marriage proposal from the most eligible bachelor in town. She's the town spinster. She's very naive and thinks he has secretly loved her because why else would he propose? As she marries him and they leave everything they know to pioneer the Colorado territory, she slowly discovers a lot of issues in her husband that make her marriage less than great. ...more
OK, I was kind of gagging that I had to read this. I mean, haven't I read enough pioneer tales for one life already? How many more sugar coated tales of surviving death by praying could I take?...and then I read this. For what it was, it was great. It was fresh, and realistic, and irreverent, and real, and thought-provoking, and uncomfortable, and funny, and tragic, and maddening, and sweet. I loved the characters. I loved the way that it was written. As one who journals myself, I loved e...more
This book kept me up late reading because I felt I had to know what happened next, and it's diary format made it easy to just keep on keeping on.
Mattie Spenser marries Luke, a Civil War veteran she's known most of her life, but whom she had only courted for a month. She doesn't know him that well, and the four years this diary covers teach her a great deal about marriage, love, hardship, and endurance. They travel west to Colorado and homestead in a sod house. Life, birth, death; al...more
Mattie Spenser marries Luke, a Civil War veteran she's known most of her life, but whom she had only courted for a month. She doesn't know him that well, and the four years this diary covers teach her a great deal about marriage, love, hardship, and endurance. They travel west to Colorado and homestead in a sod house. Life, birth, death; al...more
As I read The Diary of Mattie Spenser all I could think about is how soft 21st century western women are and not in the good feminine way. No, we are cursed with the blessing of leisure time, time which we spent complaining, feeling entitled, constantly looking with a microscope at petty things in our lives that women of earlier generations (and currently other places in the world) had no time to blubber over. We take for granted that we have the freedom to earn and keep money, to vote, to take ...more
Review By:"mamareadssomuch"
Sandra Dallas' novel about Mattie Spenser's diary is very well written and reminds me of the wagon adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Story opens out in present day when an older lady is moving and her neighbor is helping her get things packed. They discover a family diary and thus begins the story.
Mattie is a young newlywed to Luke Spenser and the two are heading to Colorado Territory to begin their life together. While the union is iff...more
Sandra Dallas' novel about Mattie Spenser's diary is very well written and reminds me of the wagon adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Story opens out in present day when an older lady is moving and her neighbor is helping her get things packed. They discover a family diary and thus begins the story.
Mattie is a young newlywed to Luke Spenser and the two are heading to Colorado Territory to begin their life together. While the union is iff...more
.. my first book of the hew year!! :)It was good. A quick read that made me really appreciate my life. Being an early settler of the West, would have been the worst thing ever!Although the book is not a true diary, it is a good example of how we can suffer at the hand of our own decisions, in how much of Matties whole life was defined by a few misconceptions,and hasty choices she made during those few years.
I've read Sandra Dallas before - and I like her books about ordinary people in the most "ordinary" of places, the Midwest.
The second half of the book MORE than made up for the few slow bits of the beginning. First book I've cried over for a long time.
I've often marveled at the strength, courage and old fashioned gumption -- both from the tales within my own family (one great grandmother married, moved from PA to IL and there lost her first five or six children to ...more
The second half of the book MORE than made up for the few slow bits of the beginning. First book I've cried over for a long time.
I've often marveled at the strength, courage and old fashioned gumption -- both from the tales within my own family (one great grandmother married, moved from PA to IL and there lost her first five or six children to ...more
Marti
rated it
The Diary of Mattie Spencer was a great read. It is set up like a diary and introduces us to Mattie Spencer, a fabulous main character. Each entry grabbed you with her honesty and heart as she set out with her husband to be a homesteader in Colorado. I liked her and found her entirely realistic and wanted to cheer her on. She was intelligent, persistent, strong (body, mind, and soul) and a hell of a woman. Her journal speaks to the deprivation of the pioneer woman with the absolute guts it t...more
2-1/2 stars. This is another one of Sandra Dallas' books that didn't work as well for me. I realize that the premise provides us with a personal and secret diary of a pioneer woman, so private that the character Mattie divulges personal feelings and emotions that no 18th century woman with her breeding and background would ever discuss. I don't care that Mattie intended to burn the book--I just couldn't believe that she would really write such details about her sexual life. Was that really wh...more
it was a quick, thrilling read about a strong willed woman in her early twenties who marries a man who is bent upon going to the wild west to set up a farmstead in the nineteenth century. Written in the form of a diary, it is an engaging account of how things were - encounters with Red Indians, setting up a house in adverse situations and climates, bonding with various kinds of people, all narrated in a tongue in cheek funny way. I was engrossed in the book and passed an otherwise tedious journe...more
I zipped right through this book. Mattie and I could totally hang out. If we were homesteading together we would be best friends. This is a book about keeping it together, through thick and thin, mostly thin. Dallas has a friendly approachable writing style and I highly recommend this book.
Mattie Spenser's fictional journal delves into the life of a prairie woman, from the threat of Indian raids to the loss of children through childbirth or by disease/accident, and the reality of frontier marriage (partnering up not necessarily for love, but convenience). "Mattie Spenser" is basically a step up for fans of the Dear America series, for those who want a little more grit and reality served with their historical fiction. Mattie is a very steadfast and intriguing character, a...more
This is a well-written, compelling story with well-developed, believable characters. It's Mattie Spenser's private diary that she keeps during about the first 3 years of her marriage. Just after the wedding, to a man she hardly knows, Mattie and her husband set out from Iowa to their own Colorado homestead. Having few of her own sex with whom she can confide, the journal becomes a depository of her joys, worries, sorrows, and all that is involved in the not-so-simple life she has chosen by ag...more
Rosalie
rated it
Recommends it for:
Christie, Patty, Beth, Kathy,
Shelves:
historical-fiction,
read-in-2011
Reason for Reading_Love Sandra Dallas's stories
From_Picked up at Goodwill and was saving it to read.(Sometimes I don't want to read something because I don't want it to be done.)
Mattie Spenser marries and heads to the Colorado Territory to start a new life. Her husband seems to have picked her, not really for love, but he thought she would be a good partner. Maybe that isn't a bad reason for picking. Her journal is her confidante and friend through the thick and thin of the trip.
...more
From_Picked up at Goodwill and was saving it to read.(Sometimes I don't want to read something because I don't want it to be done.)
Mattie Spenser marries and heads to the Colorado Territory to start a new life. Her husband seems to have picked her, not really for love, but he thought she would be a good partner. Maybe that isn't a bad reason for picking. Her journal is her confidante and friend through the thick and thin of the trip.
...more
This fictional story is set in the late 1800's and begins with Mattie, who lives in Iowa, being proposed to, by a handsome young man in town. He had just come back from the Colorado Territory and is looking for a helpmate. The story details the trip to their homestead out West very shortly after their wedding, and their subsequent life under very trying conditions. This book is well researched for accuracy of what life was like in this time and place. It is an unsentimental portrayal of the time...more
Nancy
rated it
First of all, I love the format of this book as Mattie Spenser tells the story of her life as a pioneer woman in Colorado territory in the mid-1800s by writing in her diary as though conversing with a close friend. One forgets it’s a work of fiction as it feels like you’re reading about a real person. Having kept a journal off and on for most of my life I couldn’t help but enjoy and respect Mattie for using her journal to vent her true feelings in a chauvinistic society where she so frequently h...more
I can't put my finger on the appeal of this book. It was extremely painful to read. I loved Mattie's character, but I can't say I endorsed all the things she believed or did. I think I loved it because it seemed so real... Mattie seemed real. The book unfolded like life- not like a controlled, conventional plot. The characters had dimensions. As I try to describe it, what comes to mind is one of Michaelangelo's sculptures - so truly art, and yet by the end it appears real enough to live an...more
While I liked the main character and mostly liked the descriptions and the writing, I found the book really problematic. I know this is supposed to be a 19th century woman's diary, and so maybe the author was trying to reflect how her thinking might have been, but American Indians are almost all portrayed extremely negatively, I mean really negatively (the only good one quickly winds up dead of course, going along with that whole "only good Indian is a dead Indian" mantra). Additiona...more
2.5 stars
Lost in a trunk in her granddaughter’s attic, Mattie Spenser’s diary is a pearl waiting to be discovered. Once the cover is opened, a remarkable story unfolds of homesteading, survival, hardship and tragedy.
Sandra Dallas has created a Wild West tale around the fictional diary of Mattie Spenser. Wed in Iowa, she and her husband Luke embark on an arduous trek to Colorado to become farmers. As one would imagine, life is tough. Weather, shelter, Indians, and illn...more
Lost in a trunk in her granddaughter’s attic, Mattie Spenser’s diary is a pearl waiting to be discovered. Once the cover is opened, a remarkable story unfolds of homesteading, survival, hardship and tragedy.
Sandra Dallas has created a Wild West tale around the fictional diary of Mattie Spenser. Wed in Iowa, she and her husband Luke embark on an arduous trek to Colorado to become farmers. As one would imagine, life is tough. Weather, shelter, Indians, and illn...more
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
With the convention of finding a diary in an elderly neighbor's attic trunk framing her story, Dallas creates a ripping good read from this fictional journal. Beginning in 1865, a week after her wedding in Fort Madison, Iowa, Mattie Spenser confides to her diary as she and her new husband travel by Conestoga wagon to the Colorado Territories. The building of a sod house; the births and deaths of children; the melting of narrow attitudes toward "loose"...more
From Booklist
With the convention of finding a diary in an elderly neighbor's attic trunk framing her story, Dallas creates a ripping good read from this fictional journal. Beginning in 1865, a week after her wedding in Fort Madison, Iowa, Mattie Spenser confides to her diary as she and her new husband travel by Conestoga wagon to the Colorado Territories. The building of a sod house; the births and deaths of children; the melting of narrow attitudes toward "loose"...more
I really enjoyed reading this book. It is a fictionalized journal of a girl traveling with her new husband to make a home on the Colorado territory.
I happened upon this while looking for another book--it must have belonged to one of the girls who used to live here. It is a novel--not a real diary--and the heavy hand of the author makes itself felt throughout. Every possible bad thing that ever happened to pioneers in the Colorado territory is included, along with a few romance novel type plot twists. It is supposed to be the diary of a young bride who came to Colorado to homestead with her husband, but it's a bit too tidy, and all the lo...more
I am so glad I live now and not then.
Often in traveling with our RV group we women will talk at the end of the day and remark about the country side we have seen during the day and we will always remark on how hard it must of been for women as they crossed this country not in covered wagons but on foot because the wagon was full of your belongings, there was no highway, kichen and lets not mention shower and bathroom. They started out on there way to their new home full of excitement to...more
Often in traveling with our RV group we women will talk at the end of the day and remark about the country side we have seen during the day and we will always remark on how hard it must of been for women as they crossed this country not in covered wagons but on foot because the wagon was full of your belongings, there was no highway, kichen and lets not mention shower and bathroom. They started out on there way to their new home full of excitement to...more
I would have never picked up this book if it hadn't been .50 at a library book sale. That said, it was worth the pocket change. The back description doesn't do it any justice. This story is engaging, well written, and thought-provoking. It made me very, VERY thankful to have be born in this era of the United States - where people marry for love and are afforded conveniences we often take forgranted (running water, soap, certified doctors). If you're interested in the post civil war era, the expa...more
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Award-winning author SANDRA DALLAS was dubbed “a quintessential American voice” by Jane Smiley, in Vogue Magazine. Sandra’s novels with their themes of loyalty, friendship, and human dignity have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and have been optioned for films.
A journalism graduate of the University of Denver, Sandra began her writing career as a reporter with Business ...more
More about Sandra Dallas...
A journalism graduate of the University of Denver, Sandra began her writing career as a reporter with Business ...more
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