The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton: A Novel

This is Jane Smiley's ninth book (1998); the premise and the character sounded intriguing so my book group selected this for our June read. Smiley has won numerous literary awards including a Pulitzer and The National Book Critics Circle Award (for A Thousand Acres) and this book won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. This is set in the mid-west in the years running up to the Civil War (1855) when tensions between free and slave holding states were ramping up.
I think the New York Times does an admirable job of setting up the book in their review:
"At 20, Lidie is tall, plain, bookish and argumentative, by her own reckoning ''what you might call an odd lot, not very salable and ready to be marked down.'' Her half sisters in Quincy, Ill., view her as a problem to be solved, and so one of them furthers the fateful match between Lidie and Thomas Newton, who is on his way to the Kansas Territory, known as K.T., with a dozen Sharps rifles and the support of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, which hopes to see Kansas enter the Union as a Free State."
Book One (262 pages) is all about the very rough and tumble life that Lidie and Thomas embark upon trying to homestead in a place where the people from Missouri were determined to route out those "damned black abolitionists" at any cost in order to make the K.T. a slave state. I won't spoil it by telling you what happens, but suffice to say that. in Book Two. Lidie leaves the K.T. and, disguising herself as a young man, has quite a number of adventures and tries to help a slave escape before eventually ending up back in Quincy, IL. Lidie had been immersed in her husband's abolitionist views when they married and moved to Lawrence to be with other members of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company; prior to that she had been apolitical, knowing only what a distant half-sister who supported abolition had told her. Lidie doesn't really know what she believes. The LA Times writes that Lidie's conflicts are a means to explore such moral questions as "How far should one go in the name of beliefs? How tolerant should one be of others' values, particularly values you find abhorrent? Is territoriality justifiable? Is theft in the name of a cause justifiable? Is it OK to steal from people who have been good to you, even if you don't believe that what you're taking--a slave--can rightly be considered property at all? Is revenge justified? Are there circumstances in which killing is justifiable?"
What I liked about this book was what I often enjoy about historical novels. I learned about a period of time and a place with which I was unfamiliar. I was actually born in Kansas but moved to Oklahoma before I started school so never learned much about it's history. The day to day struggle of living in such a harsh environment--especially for those coming from the civilized East who were lured with promises of well developed towns, free fertile farmland, and mild winters--is rendered in detail. Although we have all read various accounts of the Civil War and heard about John Brown, the horrendous violence that occurred in newly opening territories between "free-staters" and those who wanted to preserve the right to own slaves was unfamiliar to me. But to me, the first half of the book was a slog. The pace picked up in the 2nd half of the book, although the NYT found that part of the novel incredible (as in, hard to believe). Overall, I found Lidie particularly frustrating because she never clearly comes to hold positions and opinions of her own. The ending was believable but highly unsatisfactory.  More favorable reviews are available from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.