Once again, I’m catching up with the last of the reviews for my Summer Reading Thing list. Website review tomorrow, and be sure to participate in the craft book club poll!

I bought Tower of Strength back in March, when I first met Annette Lyon (the author). It’s the latest of her series on books centered around the old LDS temples built in Utah.

In Tower of Strength, Tabitha married young, became pregnant almost immediately—and is widowed just two months after her wedding. She spends the next six years hundreds of miles away, building a life for herself and her son. When her hometown’s newspaper owner offers Tabitha the Sanpitch Sentinel, she decides to return home.

But things aren’t easy for her there. She has to see her bitter former mother-in-law regularly, she faces opposition to a woman owning the paper as well as the stories she’s printing, and she undertakes breaking a wild horse. Meanwhile, she develops feelings for the newly-widowed Samuel Barnett—but she struggles to let herself rely on anyone else after her first husband’s death left her abandoned. Samuel, too, has to work through his own problems as he learns a whole new trade with unpredictable animals—and finds himself falling in love only months after losing his beloved wife.

The characters in Tower of Strength are complex and well-rounded. I think the only thing that detracted for me in the book was the fact that I didn’t really “feel” like Samuel was English. He “sounded” just as Western as the other characters—though maybe if I’d read his passages in an English accent, he might have sounded more accurate 😉 . It could also be a time period thing.

What do you think? How many little speech patterns does it take to convey a character is from another culture? How much is too much?