This HaBO comes from Melinda, who is looking for an American historical romance:
Bare with me, I read this book back in 1999-2000 or thereabouts, but it was probably a few years older than that. I don’t remember a whole lot, but I could swear the title had Alaska or Gold Rush in it. It was partially set in Alaska.
The book details a woman’s life and her love for two men. She falls in love with the first man, and somehow they are separated or she thinks he has died. I think she may have been pregnant, because she marries a man who is kind and generous to her who is a few years older than she is, and is happy and comes to love him. I think they live in San Francisco. This man has a heart attack, I think, and dies, and somehow she ends up traveling to Alaska during the Gold Rush, and she opens a saloon or something, and somehow her first love finds her there and they live happily ever after.
Any of these details could be misremembered, it’s all very hazy, but this is one of those books that really hit me in the feels, so I would like to go back and read it again, see if it stands up to the test of time.
This sounds like quite the soapy book.
This sounds so familiar but I can’t place it. Was it a Sunfire book, maybe? Will dig into the Googles.
This made me think of Linda Lael Miller. I can’t remember any particular books though. It’s been ages since I read her.
That has some of (but not all) of the same details as Calico Palace, by Gwen Bristow. She never goes to Alaska, but she does marry have to go through a few husbands during the California Gold Rush, and she does help her friend run a saloon.
My first thought was Calico Palace as well.
While Calico Palace sounds like an interesting story, I don’t think that is the one. I distinctly remember a good portion of the book being set in Alaska. And I don’t think it’s a Linda Lael Miller novel, as I read quite a bit of her back then, and this book read more like an epic or a saga than hers, and was at least twice as long as her usual novels. I so wish I could go back to the library in the little town I grew up in and scour the shelves for this book.
It is highly possible that it is a Sunfire book, though I had to Google Sunfire books to know what they were. The covers are pretty on style with what I remember, but I’ll have to read it to know for sure. Caroline is the one set during the Gold Rush time frame.
Could this be a Valerie Sherwood? I somewhat remember parts of this, it seems, but I would have read it back in high school in the early ’80’s.
There are similarities to Maggie Osborne’s I Do! I Do! I Do!, but a lot of the details don’t match up.
It wouldn’t have been a Sunfire book because those are all MG/YA- no marriages, no babies.
This feels like an old skool bodice ripper sort of thing. A Zebra? A Rebecca Brandewyne?
I went through the entire back list of both Rebecca Brandewyne and Valerie Sherwood. I’m 100% sure it isn’t any of the Brandewyne novels listed on Goodreads. One of Valerie Sherwood’s novels could be it, These Golden Pleasures. I’ll have to find a copy to read to be certain, though. Either way, going through both back lists, I found plenty of old school goodness to add to my TBR list.
There are several Alaska-themed series by Tracey Peterson, but I think her stuff is pretty chaste so if you remember lots of sexytimes, probably not.
Not So Wild a Dream by Francine Rivers has a similar plot. The heroine is half Cherokee (princess), half Scottish and has relationships with three different men on her way to becoming the wealthiest woman in California (gold rush).
There’s a small possibility that it is Francine Rivers, since I did read a few of her books during that time period, and since I can’t remember too many details, such as the heat level, I can only verify if I read it, so I’ll add it to my TBR.