Review: The Daughter’s Walk by Jane Kirkpatrick

Title: The Daughter’s Walk: A Novel
Author: Jane Kirkpatrick
Released: April 5, 2011
Publisher: WaterBrook Press
Pages/Format: 400 (Trade Paperback)
Genre: Christian Historical Fiction
Source: Publisher

In 1896 Norwegian American Helga Estby accepted a wager from the fashion industry to walk from Spokane, Washington, to New York City within seven months in an effort to earn ten thousand dollars to save the family far. She brought along her eighteen-year-old daughter, Clara, and the two made their way on the 3,500-mile trek by following the railroad tracks. After returning home to the Estby farm more than a year later, Clara chose to walk on alone, leaving the family and changing her name. Her decisions initiated a more than twenty-year separation from the only life she had known.

Historical fiction writer Jane Kirkpatrick picks up where the fact of the Estbys’ walk leaves off to explore Clara’s continued journey. What motivated Clara to take such a risk in an era when many women struggled with the issues of rights and independence? And what personal revelations brought Clara to the end of her lonely road? The Daughter’s Walk weaves personal history and fiction together to invite readers to consider their own journeys and family separations, to help determine what exile and forgiveness are truly about.

One Sentence Review: The Daughter’s Walk is a fascinating fictionalized account of a true story, though I wish there had been more spiritual development and resolution throughout the novel.

In-Depth Review:

I decided to read The Daughter’s Walk because it sounded like such an interesting story–two women walking across the country for a wager in the late nineteenth century. What a fascinating premise for a novel! The fact that this walk is an actual historical event makes it even more interesting. Of all the main characters in the novel, only three are completely fictional. Clara, her mother, her siblings, and the two female furriers who Clara goes to work for are all real people whose names have not been changed.

The novel spans forty years of Clara Estby’s life from the time her mother first decided to walk across the country and take Clara along, to her mother’s death decades later. Part one, which is almost half the length of the book, recounts in fictional detail the walk from Spokane to New York City. Part two, which spans most of the second half of the book imagines what Clara’s time in exile from her family was like, and part three, which is just a few pages long, tells of how Clara made peace with the remaining members of her family over twenty years later.

The backdrop for the entire story is the early feminist movement, which began to gain widespread support in the late nineteenth century. Helga Estby was a suffragette, and although Clara begins her journey without any feminist inclinations, we soon find her embracing the independent lifestyle of a businessperson which was rarely pursued by women in those days.

When I began reading The Daughter’s Walk, I was curious as to whether Kirkpatrick would approach early feminism as a positive thing or a negative thing (as per the traditionally conservative Christian perspective). I found that she usually viewed it in either a positive or neutral light, placing a particularly positive emphasis on suffrage, comfortable dress, women’s health, and female intelligence, as I would expect any decent author writing on the subject to do. There is not any significant negative emphasis placed on the women’s more feminist-influenced choices, which may bother some–particularly Helga’s decision to defy and bring shame to her husband and abandon her children to walk across the country on the off chance of saving the family farm–which failed anyways. I must comment here that I think the question of whether or not Helga did the right thing would make an interesting book club discussion.

Being a Christian novel, there is mention of God, but I feel that this is one of those books where God is tacked onto the story as an afterthought. Take God out of this story and you probably wouldn’t miss Him much. Even more disappointingly, there is no satisfying spiritual resolution. Yes, Clara is reunited and forgiven by the remaining members of her family, but there is very little mention of God in all of this, and Clara’s apparent distance from God during her familial exile is never satisfactorily resolved.

The value I found in this book comes from the fact that it is a true story. It’s a fascinating piece of history which I enjoyed learning about and engaging in through fiction. The Daughter’s Walk is very well-written and the characters are well-developed. The parts of the plot that were completely imagined (Clara’s relationship with Franklin comes to mind) are believable and fit well within the broader context of the story. For this reason I think it was worth reading, though I did not find within the pages the soul food I was expecting.

About Jane Kirkpatrick:

Jane Kirkpatrick is the author of more than fifteen historical novels based on the lives of actual women, and several nonfiction titles. Her books have collectively sold more than 500,000 copies, winning awards and critical acclaim. Jane lives in Oregon with her husband, Jerry.