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Every once in a while you read a book and you know after just a few pages that it is something special. I haven’t had that happen to me in along time but that all changed when I began to read this book. I can call it wonderful, lovely, fascinating but I’ll never really be able to describe the amazing detail and insight the author has fictionalized out of all of her research. Yes this book is fiction but very much based on the reality of the rise of the rather amazing Belle Huntington.

Belle’s lifestory began as Arabella Duvall Yarrington, the second daughter in a boardinghouse with two other sisters and two brothers and a now widowed Mother, who through no fault of her own, had to watch her children go hungry as she needed to feed her boarders or lose everything. The Civil War has ended but the poverty and hunger of Richmond, Virginia lived on.

Arabella’s Mother secures her a job working for Mr. Worsham at his gambling parlor and this becomes the first rung of the ladder she will climb to become Mrs. Colis Huntington.

Terrific read about a woman who did what she had to for the sake of saving her family and who did it so successfully that she really has earned a place in history.

Thank you to Between The Chapters, Kensington Publishing Corp. and the fantastic author, Shana Abé.