Do you like an occasional book cry?  Then, check out “Where Coyotes Howl” by Georgetown-based author Sandra Dallas.

Dallas is the best-selling author of more than a dozen novels and other literary works, and a former bureau chief for Business Week magazine.

The title for her 2023 novel is taken from lyrics of the traditional song, “The Cowboy’s Lament”: “Bury me not on the lone prairie, where coyotes howl, and the wind blows free.”

The prologue introduces two older ladies who visit a weather-worn house and begin the saga by retelling what happened there 30 years ago. From the setting of Wallace, Wyoming in the early 20^th century, Dallas paints a vivid picture of life and nature through a story of the loneliness, love and tragedy women pioneers faced on the High Plains.

Ellen Webster, the protagonist, moves to Wallace to be the teacher in a one-room school. She quickly learns that the Wyoming winter blizzards are uncaring and the summers are blistering. Ellen meets a handsome cowboy, Charlie Bacon (nicknamed Fatback) and they marry after a long courtship. Throughout many wilderness obstacles, they share an enduring love for each other.

Unfortunately, Ellen’s few women neighbors do not have the same marital success as she has. Their husbands beat them and make them work like slaves. One particularly poignant line in the novel occurs when Helen is visiting a neighbor who had attended college before her marriage. The woman says, “Shakespeare isn’t much use when you are milking cows or changing diapers.”

Ellen, too, suffers from hunger and losses in childbirth as did many other pioneer women.  But she perseveres in her heartbreak through an understanding of her neighbors’ plight and her own duty as a wife.

If you like Western American historical fiction, then pick up “Where Coyotes Howl.”  It kept my attention from beginning to end.

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    Bill Brown is an educator and journalist based in Choctaw, Oklahoma. His daughter, Jennifer Brown, owns the Mountain Gal Boutique and Quacker Gift Shop in Grand Lake. Her husband, Steve Kudron, is Grand Lake’s town manager. Brown and his wife of 60 years visit northern Colorado often. They like to see the snow, view the majestic mountains and play with their daughter’s three cats.