These Is My Words

 

These Is My Words 

By Nancy Turner

This is the diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881–1901, Arizona Territory. And let me tell you, the first 30 pages contain enough trauma to send me to a therapist for years. YIKES! Rape, murder, tragic child deaths, Indian attacks, attempted abduction… I’ll be honest, I don’t think I would have thrived under these conditions, lol.

The WILD Wild West!

The novel follows Sarah from a young woman growing up on the Arizona frontier to a wife, mother, and woman who learns to navigate a world that is often brutal and unforgiving. Through her journal entries, we experience the realities of frontier life: the constant dangers, the struggle to survive, the demands of raising a family, and the challenges women faced in a time when independence and opportunity were not always easy to come by. But this is also a story about ambition, finding your place in the world, building a home, and discovering a love that makes all the hardships a little more bearable.

“My life feels like a book left out on the porch, and the wind blows the pages faster and faster, turning always toward a new chapter faster than I can stop to read it.”

And that’s exactly what this book feels like. Sarah’s journal IS the story, and I was completely captivated. I started it this weekend and finished it this weekend. I couldn’t put it down.

My thoughts on Sarah? This woman has grit. She’s courageous, strong but vulnerable, independent, and not afraid to speak her mind. She fights for her family, wants an education, and knows what she wants out of life. She doesn’t simply accept the hand she’s dealt. She questions things, makes her own decisions, and keeps moving forward, even when life knocks her down. What a woman!

One of the things I loved most was how real Sarah felt. As she educates herself, her grammar improves. As life changes her, her writing changes. As she has more children and life gets busier, her journal entries become more spaced out. You can actually see her growing and evolving through her words. She doesn’t feel like a character in a historical novel. She feels like a real woman living a very VERY hard life.

Because the story is told through Sarah’s journal entries, we experience everything from her perspective. We see the frontier through her eyes, from its dangers and hardships to the everyday moments of family life. Her spirit jumps off the page as she writes about ordinary days alongside extraordinary experiences. There is deep love, devastating loss, triumph, struggle, and more than a few moments that left my mouth hanging open.

The first 30 pages and the last 30 pages gutted me.

At the heart of this story is a love story that unfolds slowly, but I came to really admire it. As Sarah observes the relationships around her, she begins to understand what she wants for herself. Not just a husband or someone to share a life with, but a REAL love. The kind you can hear, feel, and trust. A love built on respect, devotion, and truly knowing another person. The kind that is rare. Rare for all of us, really.

And I think that’s what this book is ultimately about for me. It’s about the people Sarah holds closest to her heart, the family she builds, and how the love she gives and receives, along with the losses she endures, shape the woman she becomes. It’s about a life that is far from easy but is still filled with meaning, connection, and moments of happiness worth holding on to.

I also loved this quote:

“It seems there is always a road with bends and forks to choose, and taking one path means you can never take another one. There’s no starting over nor undoing the steps I’ve taken.”

What a truth. This one made me stop and think about my own life and all the opportunities I’ve had that I didn’t choose. We all wonder sometimes what life might have looked like if we’d taken a different road. What if we’d made a different decision, said yes instead of no, or gone in a completely different direction?

But just like Sarah says, there’s no undoing the steps we’ve taken. We can wonder about the roads not taken, the lives we might have lived, and the people we might have become. But we never really know how those other stories would have ended.

Maybe that’s what makes this book so powerful. Sarah’s life is nothing like the one she could have imagined for herself, yet she keeps going. She loves deeply, suffers unimaginable loss, finds strength she probably never knew she had, and continues to grow into the woman she becomes. Life doesn’t spare her pain, and it certainly doesn’t give her an easy road. But it gives her love, purpose, and moments that make the hardships worth enduring.

And isn’t that life, in so many ways? We make choices, circumstances make choices for us, and sometimes we simply do the best we can with the road in front of us. We spend time wondering about the paths we didn’t take, when the life we are living is still unfolding.

This book reminded me that a life isn’t measured by how smoothly it goes or how closely it follows the plan we once had. It’s measured, at least in part, by how deeply we love, what we endure, and who we become along the way.

Sarah’s story was tough to read, but it also reminded me how much strength and beauty can exist alongside sorrow.