AN UNHAPPY COUNTRY —Loretta Miles Tollefson

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In 1846 in North America, the stakes couldn’t be higher for the US and Mexico. Polk has risen to the Presidency by promising vast territorial expansion, and Mexico has been pushed back to the Rio Grande losing half of its dominion—over a semi-phony excuse of military confrontation. White men and brown men are killing each other at a ferocious clip and the US in particular is swept up in a wave of patriotism, honor, glory-worship, and enthusiasm. But what is it like on the ground, particularly in Nuevo Mexico?

Tollefson sites her historical fiction in Santa Fe and Taos, focusing her gaze through on a young traumatized Missourian Jessie Milbank. More than anyone else in occupied Santa Fe, she understands what war really means and how it will affect her family and friends, having lost her mother in a horrific militia murder in Missouri.

Now in a multiracial community, she sees how emotions are mixed, how little power women have, and how only personal relationships can provide refuge from military occupation. No character is entirely what they seem, and some are concealing secrets that could get them hung. Things get worse as the US troops are on the move chasing “rebels” and the Milbank entourage is hired to bring supplies to them in route to Taos. Jessie witnesses horrific war scenes and her essential pacifism is reinforced, event by event.

An Unhappy Country is not only a keen and insightful portrayal of a young woman in 1846 and 47, but it is a chronicle of other women, their views of conflict and death, and their changing values under the cruelest of pressures. Through it all, we get history, atmosphere, a driving plot, the sadness and regret of unnecessary death, a resolution of three murders, and a shocking reveal of who starts revolts and why. This book seduces, then grabs you into action, and only then gives you redemption and hope for the future.