Customer Reviews

The Beloved Woman

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This is one of Deborah Smith's early works in the style of Harlequin Romance Novels. Her later works, A Place to Call Home, Bear Mountain etc are more mainstream novels. Good Story line. Highly recommend if you like women being swept over their feet, and people never saying what they truly feel due to pride.

I read anything and everything that Deborah Smith writes. I love her storytelling abilites. Check her out!

This 2001 novel is set against what the Cherokee would call Nu-No-Du-Na-Tlo-Hi-Lu, "The Trail Where They Cried." On May 26, 1838, federal troops forced thousands of Cherokee from their homes in the Southeastern United States, driving them toward Indian Territory in Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died of disease and starvation along the way in one of the most bitter winters on record.

Katherine Blue Song is a Cherokee woman trained in white medicine, known as the "Beloved Woman" for her healing touch on the trail. Justis Gallatin, a white man, is her love interest. Their complex story is first told in the 1989 contemporary romance (Loveswept series) novels about their great-great-great granddaughters: Sundance and the Princess, Tempting the Wolf, and Kat's Tale; repacked as The Cherokee Trilogy in "Follow the Sun" (1991). Although The Beloved Woman was published a decade after these series novels, it gives an inside view of the heartache of the Trail of Tears from an inside perspective.

For a larger historical context of the division within the Cherokee tribe and political situation that legalized this tragedy watch the PBS American Experience documentary "We Shall Remain: Trail of Tears."