Having read all three books in the “One Thousand White Women” series, I found this last one to be the weakest. I’m sure it would have been better reading for me if I had just recently read the first two in the series. As it was, I spent the first part of the novel trying to recall who was who and remember the sequence of events.

As in the previous novels, Molly and May are the central characters and the story centers around the journals they kept during their time living as Indians. In this book, there was more of a supernatural element running through their lives.

There were many goodbyes and reunions throughout the book and at times I felt it was a bit redundant. Also the characters each told stories of some of the same events, but really with nothing new added.

I did like the details about the cultures of the different tribes and the games they played amongst each other—somewhat like the Native American Olympics.

Near the end of the book, the topic of missing Native American women and children is discussed. The lack of attention given this is appalling, as were the numbers of those unaccounted for. I would love to see Jim Fergus write a story about Molly Standing Bear and her efforts to find these women and children and bring their abusers to justice.

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for allowing me to read an advance copy. I’m happy to give my honest review. ( )

Strongheart is the final chapter of the western trilogy that Jim Fergus began in 1998 with One Thousand White Women. In that first novel, President Grant and Cheyenne Nation chief Little Wolf agreed on an exchange of one thousand white women for one thousand of the tribe’s best horses. But don’t be mislead by that one-horse-for-one-woman trade because the entire trilogy is a strong pro-feminism statement about the power of women to adapt to new challenges while at the same time influencing the dominant culture in positive ways.

All three books are based upon diaries and journals kept by some of the most influential women who joined the tribe: May Dodd, who was released from a Chicago mental institution so that she could be part of the initial trade; Irish twins Meggie and Susie Kelly; and Mollie McGill, whose words are so large a part of Strongheart. As a result, the reader experiences life with the Cherokee through the eyes of some of the strongest women imaginable exactly as they experienced it on a daily basis.

Contemporary characters in Strongheart include Molly Standing Bear, descendent of one of the diarists, and JW Dodd, son of the man who first published a portion of the diaries in a Chicago magazine called Chitown when JW was just a boy. Molly and JW shared a mutual crush as pre-teens, and because of that, Molly has decided now to share more of the historical diaries that have come into her possession so that JW, as the magazine’s current editor, can publish them as his father did before him.

Strongheart picks up the story shortly after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a battle that would prove to be the short-lived immediate victory that would ultimately doom forever the way of life the tribes so precariously held on to. By this point in the story, the women have successfully married into the tribe and have children of their own. Sadly, however, many of the mothers and their children have been killed even before the Little Bighorn fight by surprise attacks on their villages by American soldiers. Now, the tribes have broken into smaller groups all in search of a place to safely make it through the coming winter.

Despite the odds against them, a group of white warrior women and the Cherokee women who trained them, is determined to take up the fight for survival alongside their men. Others in the tribe make a different decision for themselves and their children. This is their story.

Bottom Line: The One Thousand White Women trilogy is about a group of courageous women who learn that they are more equal in the world created by “savages” than they ever will be in the “civilized” world from which they came - and some of them are not ready to give up that life even if they have to die to keep it. The story is rightly sympathetic to the plight of the women and their new families, but it shares that sympathy, too, with the often-bewildered boy soldiers who oppose them. Note, also, that there is much here that those interested in the sociology of America’s indigenous people during this tragic era are certain to appreciate.

Review Copy provided by Publisher ( )

In 1873, a Cheyenne chief offers President Grant the opportunity to exchange one thousand horses for one thousand white women, in order to marry them with his warriors and create a lasting peace. These women, "recruited" by force in the penitentiaries and asylums of the country, gradually integrate the way of life of the Cheyenne, at the time when the great massacres of the tribes begin.

After the battle of Little Big Horn, some female survivors decide to take up arms against the United States, which has stolen from the Native Americans their lands, their way of life, their culture and their history. This ghost tribe of rebellious women will soon go underground to wage an implacable battle, which will continue from generation to generation.

In this final volume of the One Thousand White Women trilogy, Jim Fergus mixes with rare mastery the struggle of women and Native Americans in the face of oppression, from the end of the 19th century until today. With a vivid sense of the 19th century American West, Fergus paints portraits of women as strong as they are unforgettable.