You just never know what you are going to get these days....
This one is historical romance. The description caught my attention because I have studied the US Civil War for over twenty years (gosh, I'm old) with a primary emphasis on the Battle of Gettysburg, which I even wrote an 80 page paper over in college, so when I read that the book was not only about Gettysburg but also about the Lincoln assassination, I was in.
It is also a time travel book, which I'm usually not completely impressed with. Pretty much anything that could be done with time travel has been done, so I'm usually a little bit bored with that idea, but Mitchell actually came up with some new elements--some that, in my opinion, worked and others that didn't--but at least it was original.
The story starts with Leigh Boswell in the year 2015. She is married to an abusive man, Daniel, and she plans to try to escape from him when they travel from England where they live to Gettysburg. Her friend David tells her to be careful, gives her a necklace to watch over her, etc. When Leigh gets to America, she first visits Fords Theater and sees the assassination exhibit. A few hours later, she decides to make her break for it while she's at Gettysburg. She speaks to a strange Native American girl while visiting the Devil's Den. And then it starts to storm. The next thing she knows, she's transported back in time to 1863 and finds herself in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg. It is night and the troops have laid down their arms for the most part, but it is dangerous, and she is swept away from the battlefield by one Lewis Powell, whom, if you know anything about this period in American history, was actually one of the conspirators during the Lincoln Assassination. Leigh, however, doesn't remember this, even though she's just seen the exhibit and has pictures from the exhibit on her solar powered cell phone, which she still possesses (but doesn't turn on for a very, very, very long time.)
Leigh finds herself working in various hospitals, constantly running into Powell. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say a love affair quickly brings them together. Leigh has many more adventures as she explores 19th century America, and it isn't until much later that she realizes she needs to do something to save Lincoln--or save Powell--or save them both, if she can. I won't give away the ending.
This is what I really liked about this book--the character development, the rich language, the historical accuracies. There were a few things that were off--like saying 51,000 men died at Gettysburg. No, that number includes wounded and captured; only about 8,000 actually died, but that is forgivable considering the amount of research that clearly went into the novel. The characters are, for the most part, three-dimensional. You want to know them. You feel their emotions. I am particularly impressed with Mitchell's ability to take a man regarded by American history as a scoundrel and turn him into something different--even if it is just for the sake of her work. Was Lewis Powell really to blame for his actions? Did he have redeemable qualities? I will let you decide for yourself.
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| Lewis Powell after his arrest for conspiring to assassinate Lincoln. |
There were some lingering questions with the plot that I did not understand. Again, I don't want to embed any spoilers here. I think when you read it, if you give yourself some time to reflect, you will agree that everything doesn't quite add up. But it still works. Also, there is a scene about 70% in that made me want to throw my phone, or write the author an angry letter. The main character does something so out of sorts for who I thought she was that it just didn't make any sense at all--her reaction to a particular situation just didn't seem at all believable. However, if has to happen that way for the rest of the plot to work out, and so by the end, while I was still upset about it, I had given the author and the character a bit of grace.
I will also note that many of the characters' names start with the same letters, which is a bit confusing, such as Daniel and David. In some instances, this was historically true and couldn't be changed. For others, a different first letter would have been helpful. I also wonder if our British main character isn't named after Vivien Leigh, the British actress who played Scarlet O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.
I do not see an editor or a publisher listed, and there is a lot of evidence that this is either a case of "my sister is a great editor" or "I can do it myself" because there are some mistakes--not a lot, but a few. In fact, most of the mistakes are more formatting issues--like periods after a space connected to the next sentence, or missing words in sentences, which is usually something authors won't catch if they read it themselves because our brains are wired to read what we expect to see. I think a thorough proofread is in order, by someone with a lot of experience with such things. It is written in British English, with British punctuation, etc., but I'm not talking about those differences.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who appreciates novels set in this era. It is also a really good read for romance enthusiasts. You can find my 5 star Amazon review here. And if you'd like to read The Open Doorway by Madeleine Mitchell for yourself, you can find it here. It is currently priced at $5.99, which I found to be a little high for an author who, to my knowledge, is not well-known or prolific. (I was able to get it for free on a Kindle promotion day.) It is a great read if you don't mind paying that price for it, and I was able to finish it in six days, despite the holidays and the North Texas tornadoes. (We are okay--just lost some shingles....) If you've read The Open Doorway, let me know what you think in the comments section.
