Katie-mum's gr-grandmother Catherine Rhoades had too many brothers and sisters. Her father had eight wives. It is no surprise, then, that Catherine Rhoades had a favorite sister, and probably had a favorite brother or two. We expect the brothers were Daniel and John, the big men who helped rescue the Donner Party. They'd be my favorites.

Ms. Ricketts has done a couple of good little things in her books about the Rhoades. Not the least of which is keeping all the elements straight about who did what to whom; and, using what information she had available, woven fine stories about the principle participants.

That Catherine Rhoades had three husbands, it must have been a way of shucking off the Mormon mantle. Not all at once, like in some sort of dramatic gesture or overture, but one after the other, like on a dance card.

A Dalton being kept for the last, and we would hope the most romantic. He being a dashing Irishman.

But back to the chap-book. It deals with, to a large degree, the families of the two sisters: Sarah and Catherine Rhoades and their husbands. The other members of their illustrious California Pioneering family having been remembered in other places.

Here is a good example of Ms Ricketts style:

"It was just twenty-miles cross-country between the Consumne and Dry Creek where the Rhoades family lived. The two partners, Daylor and Sheldon, even went courting together. One day when William and Jared called on the Rhoades girls, Sarah and Catherine, their dogs followed along beside the horses. The Rhoades dogs and the visiting dogs greeted each other with such ferocity that in the ensuing scuffle a churn full of cream was knocked over. This cream spilled over the board floor, causing the dogs to slip and fall as the girls chased them out with brooms."

We think this is a three flag book, and a five flag chap-book. (An unweighted average of four flags. You should be glad we didn't go for the weighting system.) We must confess, the transparency of our rating system may appear somewhat shabby, but we must give great favor to the books that tell truthfully the exploits of our family, even if the quality is not, like, superb, with artwork of a high-priced New Yorker style metamorphis. So, to balance, the obvious prejudice in our view of the western world, we give a lower flag rating for the literature as a book-book.

We think this is a good compromise.

Good reviewers were never accused of being objective, just arrogant.