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By Patricia Reiss Brooks
Joe Devlin has walked for miles through the cold harsh winter snow just to be with his wife Alice
who is taking the cure for tuberculosis at Saranac Lake. Along the way he encounters danger as well as friendship when he's injured from frostbite and then attacked and left for dead in the freezing snow. Then with the help of a friendly man called Mr. Bingham, Joe is able to get a job at a club in Lake Placid to help cover his wife's bills, but it's not enough and Joe finds that rum running to Canada is a way to pay the debts and bask in some of the nice things he and his wife Alice have never been able to enjoy. But eventually every story must come to an end and when it does we are left to wonder where will the next road lead and who will be left behind in this heartwrenching story about true love and it's boundaries.
Patricia Reiss Brooks' novel Mountain Shadows is a look inside the life of a tuberculosis patient as well as what goes on around them in the 1920's. We feel a sense of anger as prejudice seeps through time and time again, pain as we go through the trials and triumps page after page and the courage we felt when we made it through those hard times even when we knew the worst wasn't over.
While not every road was taken and we are left with a question of what happens next, Patricia Reiss Brooks does give us a good insight of what life was like for those in need of the cure and what love can do when it is pushed beyond it's boundaries in her novel Mountain Shadows.
-Shyan Marie © 2005 (shyanmarie@writersandreadersnetwork.com)
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