One Big Open Sky had all the promise of a great book.
Great premise - a black Mississippi family heads west in 1879 with the hope of land and a new life in Nebraska.
Admirable protagonist - 12-year-old Lettie is smart, loves to read newspapers and journal their journey, and knows how many miles they've traveled without even needing to count; she can just tell.
Promise of intense conflict - racism, bandits, unfriendly wildlife, river crossings, weather!
But despite all this, I had a hard time getting into it. It sat on my nightstand with a non-fiction self-help book my brother recommended collecting dust and tax papers for a couple months.
I usually enjoy books written in verse, but I think I have a harder time immersing myself in the story. And the three different narrators - Lettie, her mom, and a young woman who joins them halfway through - really had me confused the first several pages. I even continued to get confused near the end because there was no pattern to who was talking when and I just had to go back to the beginning of the section to check who was narrating almost every time. And then there was Thomas - Lettie's dad. He was a deeply flawed character and it was clear everybody had problems with him (especially his wife) except for maybe Lettie. I felt uncomfortable every time I read about him. So when he died . . . honestly, I was so relieved. And maybe that's what the author sort of wanted us to feel but I still didn't like it.
In the end, I think I liked the book. It just took me a while to get there.
