These is My Words

These is My Words has been out since 2008, so my whole­hearted two thumbs up for this book may seem a day late and a dollar short. Shame on me, because if it hadn’t been for somebody in our book club sug­gesting Turner’s book, I would have missed it entirely.

What’s not to find thor­oughly cap­ti­vating in this debut novel by Nancy E. Turner? This is Ms. Turner’s suc­cessful attempt to bring the story of her great-​​grandmother to life. If you read the notes at the end of the novel, you find that Turner intended to write a bio­graphical story of Sarah Prine, her great-​​grandmother, but even­tually the pow­erful draw of actual his­torical events took her into the realm of his­torical fiction. Turner, with the help of written and oral family history, does a mas­terful job of imag­ining Sarah’s life at the end of the nine­teenth century in Arizona when it was still a U.S. Territory.

The first person nar­rative unfolds on every page of Sarah Prine’s diary. “A storm is rolling in, and that always makes me a little sad and wistful so I got it in my head to set to paper all these things that have got us this far on our way through this heathen land.” Turner’s use of a diary for the voice and point of view of Sarah, although not a new device, is here totally fresh and the perfect way to introduce this remarkable woman. Sarah is a force to be reckoned with: she can shoot better than her brothers, rope and brand a calf as handily as any ranch hand and has a mind just waiting for every­thing that comes her way. She lives, marries, parents and matures in the heart of the Arizona Ter­ritory, at a time when the civility of Statehood was still a distant hope.

These is My Words has every­thing: murder, love, horses, hus­bands, love, children, disease, floods, droughts, bandits, Comanches, Mex­icans, and love, which is as much a part of Sarah Prine as the loaded pistol she keeps in her apron pocket. A hearty thank you to Nancy Turner. I only wish Sarah Prine had been my great-​​grandmother.

Buy These is my Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881–1901  locally or look online at Amazon​.com, Powell’s Books, through an IndieBound book­store.