Teresa Warfield

Well! I'd say this second in a series of three novels is for people who've already watched and enjoyed one of the greatest historical dramas to ever grace a television screen. As the author makes little to no introductions of most of the characters that she brings into scenes or otherwise mentions, she evidently assumes the reader is already familiar with the characters and with what's happened, overall, up to this point in the television story.

In this book, I liked some moments showing Michaela in her role as a doctor, especially in one of her visits to Cloud Dancing at the reservation. The medicine woman and medicine man go to work!

On the other hand, the fact that this novel is for fans of the show would likely be a source of irritation or frustration for Dr. Quinn diehards and other fans who know the characters from the screen. Sully acts way out of character here, easily provoked into rage and tumbling around and going to blows with an old enemy in public. And then for shady Jake the barber and trigger-happy Hank the pimping saloon owner to be the ones breaking up the fight in the street, trying to talk sense into Sully while he angrily struggles against them in a boyish battle he flew into with "no sense of rational thought"? A situation so backward that I couldn't take it seriously.

A few times during the story, different characters reflect on how this or that So-and-So has never done such-and-such or acted in such-and-such a way before now. As if the author is saying, "Yeah, what's happening here doesn't match the established characters from the show," but they're behaving this way now for the sake of this book.

The writing style isn't my favorite, and the story is rather slow and sorely repetitive in a number of places. The characters have stretches of reflection where they wonder and inwardly debate over the same details, and I found much of the book's content to be pretty inconsequential filler. It also seems that the novel starts to run out of plot too early, and so more minor events and mishaps in town, which have nothing to do with The Bounty plot, start filling up time in the last third or so of the book.

It's an almost 300-page novel that could have been a sharper and more action-packed Western in 200 pages or fewer.

Still, when there was indeed some Western action (and again, some medical doctoring) that didn't contradict who the established characters are, I liked it. And as this Dr. Quinn diehard already read the other two books in this series (didn't care for the third one, really liked the first one), my curiosity, nostalgia, and I couldn't resist finally checking out the series' middle novel.… (mais)

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: Growing Pains. Third in a series of novels I was late to find out about, but better late, right?

One might call me a DQMW superfan.

And this is a novelty novel that only fans of the Dr. Quinn television series could fully appreciate one way or the other. (The author often assumes the reader knows who the characters from TV are, so she drops a lot of them into the book without really introducing them or describing what they look like.)

I enjoyed Book One in this series, but that first novel is about Michaela Quinn’s childhood and young womanhood back in Boston, before she moves to set up a medical practice in Colorado Springs and the show begins. Hence, in that book, the author had a lot of room to make up events and depict characters who don’t appear on the television show that much or at all. The fewer established facts there are to adhere to, the more space there is to invent details without being untrue to the original story.

The first novel in this series is a good one with some weaknesses but solid plot points. Even in the switch between two different mediums, shifting from the screen to the page, that novel complements the television story it’s based on.

Unfortunately, this third novel misses on more than one level.

First of all, I just don’t think the author watched the television show enough for this book that features several of the show’s key, regular characters. Good fanfiction should build on the established facts of the original story to become a fitting extension of it, rather than clashing with the original by getting the facts wrong or missing the essence of the characters.

Now, it isn’t the biggest deal in this novel when the author keeps having the town’s newspaper editor, Dorothy, pull a notepad out of her pocket to jot down notes for the Gazette. (On the show, Dorothy regularly wears her memo book hanging from twine around her neck.) And it doesn’t matter much that Michaela and Sully’s daughter Katie is portrayed as an older toddler in this book, talking more than she did at this point on the show.

But it’s jarring when one of the townsfolk shouts for “Dr. Quinn!” during an emergency scene in this novel. It’s well-established on the show that when the everyday townsfolk call to get help from Michaela, their unconventional lady doctor, they call out, "Dr. Mike!"

It takes more than one appearance of the Reverend Johnson before the book mentions the fact that he’s blind. At first I thought the author forgot—and she apparently does at one point, as the reverend describes a newcomer he meets in town as a man with “a kind face.”

In this book, local businessman Hank talks about how he and his friend Jake the mayor/barber went panning for gold and found a gold nugget, which they used to open their Gold Nugget hotel. But on the show, Jake inherits a gold nugget from his father after the aging man (with dementia) dies. Sure, Hank may be lying to the person he’s telling the gold-panning story to…

…but it’s hard for me to believe it’s a lie rather than an unintentional inaccuracy, since the author gets Hank’s character wrong in additional ways.

Hank’s name on the show is Hank Lawson. (He was born Hans Lawsenstrom, but that’s another story.) He and other folks say his name, Lawson, multiple times in different seasons throughout the show. But he’s called “Hank Claggerty” in this book. “Hank Claggerty” and “Mr. Claggerty,” over and over again.

On television, Hank is the town’s laid-back but trigger-happy owner of The Gold Nugget hotel and saloon. He’s smug, unscrupulous, and boastful about running a booze and prostitution business. On top of that, he sees “his girls” as more—and less—than employees. (It’s a whole deep, twisted, psychological thing.) And as for business, having a hotel that provides “entertainment” for male guests is the main, um…advantage Hank and Jake have over the more genteel establishment run by bank owner and hotelier Preston, out by the hot springs.

So I don’t buy the way the author changes Hank here, making him a man who’s given up the saloon and his girls because he wants to be more respectable, now that the town is growing. It wouldn’t take anything less than something HUGE (and likely devastating) for Hank to make that kind of life-altering decision, especially considering that his son and much-loved Nana weren’t big enough reasons for Hank to make a career change on the show. His complex relationship with the former prostitute Myra alone shows that “respectability” wouldn’t be enough of a reason for Hank to change his whole lifestyle. This book misses the depth of his real character.

The author also has Michaela’s son Brian working on a regular basis for Hank after school, and Hank makes plans to play football with Brian and more of the town’s boys…

I mean, maybe “Mr. Claggerty” would go down to the schoolhouse in the middle of the day to play ball with a bunch of kids. But Hank Lawson? No.

Added to that, it’s out of character for Brian to hold such a grudge against Hank for missing a football date. On the show, sure, Brian would have been miffed and disappointed about being stood up. But he wouldn’t cold-shoulder a grown man and quit his afterschool job just like that because “you didn’t show up to play with me.”

And Michaela adding another cold shoulder and shutting her clinic door in Hank’s face because of the football thing? It doesn’t make sense for the Dr. Michaela Quinn I know. She wouldn’t like to see Brian disappointed, but she also wouldn’t get too mad or petty over someone breaking a playdate with her son—particularly given that Brian isn’t a little boy anymore. He’s a maturing adolescent with rather strong values and much more serious experiences than broken playdates.

Moreover, the book spends too much time over the playdate issue, as if it should be a major plot point in a historical fiction novel for adults. In fact, more than half the novel is spent making a big deal over issues that don’t need so many scenes or chapters devoted to them.

The football thing.
A wayward goat.
Stinky hair tonic.
Telegraph operator Horace’s new velocipede: a contraption that baffles the town.

The velocipede storyline doesn’t fit in the first place because at this point in the show’s timeline, Sully has had a velocipede for years, a gift from Michaela and the Cooper children, and the town knows it. Brian rides the velocipede/bicycle around on different occasions, and Anthony, the son of blacksmith Robert E. and café owner Grace, also rides the bicycle and wants one of his own. Robert E. even makes a wooden model bicycle for Anthony—but in this book, no one in town owns or is familiar with a velocipede. So, the story can spend chapters talking (and rehashing) stuff about Horace and the new apparatus that’s giving him trouble.

If the book hadn’t spent so much time on flat comedy, a weakly drawn romance that goes nowhere, overblown grudges, and general mundane issues, there would have been more time to develop a deeper story that would do justice to the television drama.

Michaela’s latest, heartrending experience as a doctor gets little time in this novel. Sully’s inner conflict between living in a growing town and his concern for his oppressed and displaced Indian friends, including his brother Cloud Dancing, gets little time in the novel. While the story is mainly supposed to be about the various growing pains of Colorado Springs, those main points of pain get relatively little time, and they’re eventually wrapped up with a few quick fixes.

As for the novel’s style, the author tends to state and repeat the obvious, as if the novel were written for a younger audience. Also, while I understand adjusting the voice to narrate Hank’s scenes, the narrator’s frequent use of “damn” in its nonliteral sense simply gets old after the first few times.

Yes, this is longer than my usual book review. But for someone who watches and talks about Dr. Quinn as much as I do, the “diehard DQMW fan since 1993″ in me wanted to speak up about this reading experience.

Yet, even with all of that said, I must add that my superfan self isn’t sorry I read this novel. It’s been interesting to get a look into some ways the publishing industry made itself a part of this hit television drama at the time.… (mais)

Medicine is a man's field. Women aren't allowed to attend medical school. Proper Bostonian ladies marry and become dutiful wives and mothers, not doctors. Michaela Quinn has heard it all, but medicine is her lifelong passion, and a physician is what she strives to become in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman by author Teresa Warfield.

Yup. It's a novel based on characters from one of the best historical dramas to ever grace a television screen, a superb family show from Saturday night network television in the 1990s.

Still, I didn't step into this read expecting to relive my beloved onscreen drama through it. Television is television and books are books—very different mediums for storytelling. So I let this historical fiction novel be what it is: a historical fiction novel.

It's the coming-of-age story of an imperfect, ambitious heroine who has much to learn and must fight numerous frustrations and rejections to walk in her purpose. The tale includes Michaela's vital relationship with her physician father, her difficult relationship with her conventional mother, her first romantic love, and of course, her early work on the path to becoming a doctor.

Some of the medical scenes are pretty graphic, but hey. The medical field isn't for the faint of heart.

Now, the writing style is rather trite and redundant in places, the storyline rushes at times (indeed, there are a lot of years to cover), and I'm not sure the tale really concludes so much as it just goes along and eventually stops, pretty much where the television show begins. But the novel is rich in historical background and detail, with new inventions of the time, the heated sociopolitical climate in America, the Civil War, and the shifting landscape of medicine.

In all, a worthwhile read for this fan of inspiring historical fiction.… (mais)