The AllTrue Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, Jane Smiley. (Hardcover 0679450742) Used Book available for Swap

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The AllTrue Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Author: Jane Smiley

Six years after her Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, A Thousand Acres, and three years after her witty, acclaimed, and best-selling novel of academe, Moo, Jane Smiley once again demonstrates her extraordinary range and brilliance. — Her new novel, set in the 1850s, speaks to us in a splendidly quirky voice--the strong, wry, no-nonsense voice o... more »f Lidie Harkness of Quincy, Illinois, a young woman of courage, good sense, and good heart. It carries us into an America so violently torn apart by the question of slavery that it makes our current political battlegrounds seem a peaceable kingdom.

Lidie is hard to scare. She is almost shockingly alive--a tall, plain girl who rides and shoots and speaks her mind, and whose straightforward ways paradoxically amount to a kind of glamour. We see her at twenty, making a good marriage--to Thomas Newton, a steady, sweet-tempered Yankee who passes through her hometown on a dangerous mission. He belongs to a group of rashly brave New England abolitionists who dedicate themselves to settling the Kansas Territory with like-minded folk to ensure its entering the Union as a Free State.

Lidie packs up and goes with him. And the novel races alongside them into the Territory, into the maelstrom of "Bloody Kansas," where slaveholding Missourians constantly and viciously clash with Free Staters, where wandering youths kill you as soon as look at you--where Lidie becomes even more fervently abolitionist than her husband as the young couple again and again barely escape entrapment in webs of atrocity on both sides of the great question.

And when, suddenly, cold-blooded murder invades her own intimate circle, Lidie doesn't falter. She cuts off her hair, disguises herself as a boy, and rides into Missouri in search of the killers--a woman in a fiercely male world, an abolitionist spy in slave territory. On the run, her life threatened, her wits sharpened, she takes on yet another identity--and, in the very midst of her masquerade, discovers herself.

Lidie grows increasingly important to us as we follow her travels and adventures on the feverish eve of the War Between the States. With its crackling portrayal of a totally individual and wonderfully articulate woman, its storytelling drive, and its powerful recapturing of an almost forgotten part of the American story, this is Jane Smiley at her enthralling and enriching best.

ISBN-13: 9780679450740
ISBN-10: 0679450742
Publication Date: 3/24/1998
Pages: 452
Rating:

Currently 3.4/5 Stars.

3.4 stars, based on 42 ratings

Publisher: Knopf
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback, Audio Cassette
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review

Top Member Book Reviews

Darien W. reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 3/19/2006 + 4 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 3

Really love Jane Smiley. Makes me appreciate central air and heat! Little House for grown-ups.

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Dottie J. (pippin2) reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 11/18/2006 + 48 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

Enjoyable reading, but not the book I thought it might be, but fun nonetheless. Very good author, like her other books.
Dottie J

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Geraldine L. reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 2/8/2007 + 6 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

An orphan's tale of the life she is forced by circumstances to lead. Held my interest from cover to cover. Exciting story that includes everything:love, standing by what one believes in and knowing what's worth fighting for.

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Bonnie S. (Bonnie) - reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 9/7/2007 + 425 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

All those great reviews! Gee, I had a really hard time getting through this book...and I love Westerns. But this one dragged and dragged, and I remember the narrative overpowering the flow of the story.

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Nancy D. (colafemina) reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 5/28/2010 + 83 more book reviews

This is a well written and engaging story, but somehow did not quite read true to me, the way her others have.

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Michelle C. (Shellaree) - reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 6/5/2008 + 270 more book reviews

This is a fiction book but has had copious amounts of research to make the novel very interesting. This looks into the life of a woman in Kansas around 1855 and the trials and tribulations of the era.

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David R. reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 9/9/2006 + 6 more book reviews

Well written and interesting account of a (fictional) young woman's experiences in Kansas territory during the free/slave state controversy prior to the Civil War.

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Stef S. (bookgoddessme) reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 5/12/2013 + 106 more book reviews

I am drawn to a book with a strong lead female character, and this book does not disappoint. Lidie is a true survivor, compounded by the face that women needed to be tougher than nails in the divided land of the United States in the 1850's. What a unapologetic story this novel tells of the near impossible conditions of K.T. (Kansas Territory) for the claim staking aboloitionists. Lidie lived many lifetimes in one. Slow, steady, story this book tells, but one that explains a lot about the tenacity and toughness of the people of the United States built on this foundation.

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Emi B. (wantonvolunteer) - , reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 8/5/2010 + 84 more book reviews

Lidie Newton was an interesting tomboy of a character, and her All-True Travels and Adventures taught me a lot about American history prior to the Civil War, specifically as it took place in K.T. or Kansas Territory between Free Staters (Abolitionists) and the Slavers.

Lidie's constant wavering between ideals and sides and opinions, although realistic, grated my nerves towards the end. I liked reading about a lot of the supporting characters more than her, and after 452 pages I was sad not to know what happens to a lot of them instead of her. But overall, the story was great - Lidie marries an abolitionist from Boston, leaves her family in Illinois to travel with him out west to K.T. There they battle the wilds, settle and make a home, take in her nephew Frank, and then the political situation gets violent, and Lidie's adventures really begin.

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Paul D. reviewed The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton on 2/25/2007 + 20 more book reviews

Wonderful!

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