Book Review: The Springsweet by Saundra Mitchell

• Genre: YA Historical Fiction
• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Children's Books
• Release Date: April 17, 2012
• Series: (companion to The Vespertine)
• Source: Amazon Vine

Blurb: Heartbroken over the tragic death of her fiancé, seventeen-year-old Zora Stewart leaves
Baltimore for the frontier town of West Glory, Oklahoma, to help her young widowed
aunt keep her homestead going. There she discovers that she possesses the astonishing
ability to sense water under the parched earth. When her aunt hires her out as a
“springsweet” to advise other settlers where to dig their wells, Zora feels the burden of
holding the key to something so essential to survival in this unforgiving land.
Even more, she finds herself longing for love the way the prairie thirsts for water.
Maybe, in the wildness of the territories, Zora can finally move beyond simply surviving
and start living.


Review:

After her adventures in turn-of-the-century Baltimore, Zora finds herself in an odd place. Her life isn't the same, and there's no way she can go back. To help her find her way, Zora is sent out west to live with her aunt in the newly-opened Oklahoma territory. While the hope is that this will allow Zora to get away from all the drama, drama -and romance -always manages to find her. As Zora gets settled into her new life, she finds that she has the ability to help settlers find the right place to dig for water. Her aunt starts to hire her out as a "springsweet," but in her adventures she crosses paths with a mysterious and somewhat dangerous Sooner, and romance inevitably blossoms.

I loved The Vespertine. It was one of my favorite YA historical fiction novels of 2011, and I found myself in love with the gothic romance tones and the wonderful characters and scandalous plots that graced the book's pages. I was excited for The Springsweet, but something about getting so far from Baltimore just didn't work for me. We lost the grandeur, beauty and high-class scandals of classy Baltimore and are thrown into the frontier. While I thought I could survive the sudden setting change, it was too much. The tone was gone, the gothic romance style destroyed.

Despite this, The Springsweet still had its moments. The story is still well-written and enjoyable to read with a great historical backdrop that hasn't been explored very often in literature. The writing style is simple and straight-forward, and the plot is entertaining. But Springsweet just didn't have the same spark for me as Vespertine.