Review: "Buffalo Flats" by Martine Leavitt

Buffalo Flats by Martine Leavitt
Published April 2023 via Margaret Ferguson Books
★★★

In the Northwest Territories, Rebecca has a dream: a plot of land owned under her own name, ideally left wild and untamed, where she can dream and talk with God. There's just one problem: it's the late 1800s, Rebecca is a girl, and girls can't own land. Even a grown woman can't own land, unless she's a widow.

Rebecca's quest for her spot of land is a through-line that drives this book, but it's nowhere near the overarching story. Rather, this is a year or so in the life of a Mormon pioneer girl as she—along with her friends and family—struggles to survive in a promising but harsh climate, and as life throws one thing after another at them. One of the better parts of the book is that the bad lands with the good: people live and people die, and there is no guarantee that all will turn out well.

Rebecca is devoutly Mormon, a theme that comes up again and again in the book. It's functionally Mormon fiction, which (along with it being historical fiction) puts it well outside the range of my usual fiction. But I found myself drawn more and more in as the book went on—I think partly because most of the growth Rebecca does throughout the book has little to do with religion, and partly because of that take-the-bad-with-the-good approach. It's also worth noting that Rebecca has attitudes that would have been very liberal for the time and frankly in some places would <i>still</i> be considered liberal, and (perhaps to keep the book relatively light?) she's always given more support than challenge on those attitudes.

Two omissions keep me from rating this higher: first, I don't know much about First Nations people in the Northwest Territories in the late 1800s, but I'm pretty sure they were there. As far as I can tell, though, every character in this book is white, with nary a thought for the people who were on the land before them. And second, plural marriage: this was common among the LDS at the time, and the people—Leavitt's ancestors—on whom the book is based were polygamous. But there is, again, no mention of that here. Leavitt says in the author's note at the end that she opted not to write about this part of their history because it was not written about in the book of family history that she drew on, but...I don't know. I suppose I wonder whether it wasn't written about in that family history because either 1) polygamy had only just gone out of fashion—the LDS church turned away from it in 1890, the year the book starts, so that Utah could become a state—and the topic was touchy or 2) when Leavitt's ancestor went north to Canada, he left one of his two wives behind, and she ceased to be important. Perhaps both—Canada also outlawed plural marriage in 1890, so it might have been tricky for immigrants to bring two wives north. But...in a story willing to tackle a few complicated subjects, it feels like something that is omitted for the sake of modern sensibilities.

I'm not sure I'd read more along these lines, but it made for an enjoyable and engaging deviation in my reading.