On paper, I should have liked Susanna’s Choice more. The setting (1878, Virginia City) was of high interest to me. The plot sounded promising. But I just couldn’t warm up to the characters – any of them.

When Susanna Ward’s family dies quickly from cholera on the Oregon Trail, many members of her wagon train are ready to abandon her. Gus Kirkland offers to take her in (risking cholera exposure) if the members of the train will take up a collection and pay him a thousand dollars. They do, and he uses the stake to start a store, always reminding Susanna that she isn’t really his daughter and his children are not really her siblings.

Rab Trudeau has a family in Louisiana, but he becomes alienated from them after he kills his cousin in a duel. He makes his own fortune, at first sailing around the world, and then as owner of a large San Francisco corporation. As the book opens, He learns that the stock in a Virgina City mine he owns has plummeted. He resolves to head out to Nevada to find out what’s going on, posing as a detective.

Susanna, meanwhile, is working as a reporter for a Virginia City paper. She’s ostensibly just a typesetter, but really she writes articles all the time for a drunk colleague (under his byline). She runs into Rab on the street, where he saves her from almost certain death by runaway carriage (for reasons that make no sense, she can’t hear the oncoming vehicle). He accidentally touches her breasts, and leaves a dirty handmark on her dress, and she gives him a set-down. They then dance around each other as they pursue their separate interests, which eventually converge. Susanna wants to be a full-fledged reporter, and her boss wants her to interview Rab. She’s also told by her adoptive “but I’m not really your father” that she must marry his son, her “not really” brother. But she finds herself attracted to Rab, who she sees naked when she goes to interview him (don’t ask). Rab, meanwhile, is trying to figure out what’s going on with his mine. It’s in full production, but Susanna’s paper reported that it might be petering out. It isn’t, but the owners of a rival mine want to buy it because they know a rich vein they’ve discovered is part of Rab’s mine.

On top of all this, Rab has a fiancee back home in San Francisco who is busily planning their wedding. You’ve met her before, even if you haven’t read this book; she’s your stereotypical big snob who decides that Rab’s fortune will go well with her daddy’s. Rab doesn’t actually ask her to marry him, so she takes matters into her own hands.

On paper, this all sounds relatively interesting, which is why I kept scratching my head as I read the book, wondering why I wasn’t more interested. I like western settings, and this one was plausible, well-researched, and different from anything else I’ve read lately. Plus, it started well: Wagon trains, cholera, and a New Orleans duel…all in the first twenty pages!

The characters are at least part of the problem. I thought Rab should have told his erstwhile fiancee where to stick it right away, and I thought he should have come clean about his real identity – Susanna remains in the dark for most of the book. I also found the whole thing with Susanna and her adoptive not-really family weird, and wondered why we had to be reminded all the time that they weren’t really related.

But in the end, I decided the writing style might be more of a problem. At first, it reminded me vaguely of Dana Fuller Ross’s Wagons West books (am I the only one who read those?), which were full of larger than life characters doing things you couldn’t quite believe. Then I decided maybe the language felt more like a textbook. Finally I settled upon it: It read like a biography of someone you should be interested in, but aren’t. I tried to read Undaunted Courage, a biography of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and couldn’t get more than fifty pages in, even though I was highly interested in the subject matter. Susanna’s Choice was kind of like that.

I wish I could recommend this book. I’m always on the lookout for a good American Historical, and this could have been one. But it just didn’t engage me, and I don’t really see it engaging anyone else either.