just read a book so good it blew the other stuff i read right out of the water.

the book was called the last orphan and was historical fiction. it made me seriously reconsider all the agonizing i've been doing about genre. it was so good. it made me want to write historical fiction.

in brief, it was based on a true event in the early 1800s in which mormons set upon a stagecoach party and killed everyone but eighteen kids. they gave out the eighteen kids to people in the community telling them that they died in an indian raid and to keep their mouths shut and just raise the kids for a few years. two or three years later the government came around seeking the kids and got seventeen of them. the book tells a story about the eighteenth. i find it interesting that in reality there was an eighteenth out there.

one of the best things about the book was that it had a lot of dialogue. the dialogue was all in there for a purpose, and was very realistic. the woman from arkansas had a lot of arkansas expressions and it was, as far as i could tell, all very realistic. this alone would take a lot of research.

the guy appears to have done it himself; he hasn't written a whole lot of others; he is a fallen-away mormon but, though most mormons are bad-guys in this story, he's not entirely slanderous to the mormon church. in other words, he handles a sensitive subject well. many mormons may not agree, of course. but history is history. he doesn't seem to have made them worse than they were.

it was so good, i haven't even reviewed it yet. but i will. one has to help out an author like that.