Fireweed by Mildred Walker

As followers of this blog and my other blog  Janet’s Thread  http://willisweaver1.wordpress.com  will know, I recently travelled from Dublin to Seattle and back.  My reading for the flight westward was I Used to Be Irish by Blain and I wrote a blog entry about it a week or so ago.  On the flight eastbound I read Fireweed by Mildred Walker.  This is an author I discovered at The Secret Garden book store in Seattle.  Ms Walker wrote during the 1930’s right up to the 1970’s.  I bought and read 2 of her books in April – The Curlew’s Cry and The Brewers’ Horses.  These books were previously published in the 1940’s.  They are very well written and I was eager to read more.  And happy I was to find 2 more on this recent trip to Seattle.  Fireweed is one of the books I found.  It was written in the 1930’s, and like her others, is somewhat autobiographical – that is, much of the material stems from her own experiences.  And there is a great deal of social history.

  Fireweed by Mildred Walker, originally published in 1934, reissued by Bison Books 60 years later in 1994.

The history of the lumber industry and the depression form the background for this novel.  The main character and her husband are the children of Scandinavian pioneers, and the story of their struggles is carefully drawn.