A saga.  A really long dramatic tale about a woman’s life.  She started out in the slums of London, worked as a nursemaid for a ministers family and emigrated to America… ended up getting together with the minister when his wife died,  only for him to die a couple days before their wedding.  But she found out she was pregnant,  so she took a wagon train to Oregon.  So. Much. Drama.

I have to be impressed with the sheer amount of research that had to go into this novel.  It covered a long time period and a lot of early American history.