Book Review

Frances Allard of Craghead, Allard & Wirtanen, Booksellers wrote:

The character of Timothy in Timothy Nolan’s Idaho, 1862 to 1890 represents the voice historical writer and teacher Carole Simon-Smolinski has heard speaking to her throughout her many years of research on the creation of the State of Idaho. Timothy came to life in 1983, as he chronicled daily about his trip from the east to find gold in Idaho Territory.  Now, his personal recollections figure as a guide to the years that birthed the full-fledged state. In this present work, as in the previous one, Timothy focuses on other people, revealing little of his own life. The reason for this is that in an unusual approach to what is truly a nonfiction work, Timothy Nolan is a fictional character, as Carole makes clear in her prologue. As she looks back upon her own journey with these two books, Carole has come to realize that she herself is Timothy, and that he represents her deep desire to actually live in and tell about the times she writes about.

Timothy is Carole’s time-travelling self, which lends a wonderful sense of immediacy to his comments on the Idaho history he’s seen happening and lived. His vision is clear, vivid and accessible to readers because Carole can virtually “see” that time period when she writes about it through Timothy’s eyes and ears. She uses his wisdom gleaned from years of observation; in other words, she’s on the spot reporting. As Timothy carefully records his “conversations” with real people (both common and prominent) across the years of the developing territory to Idaho statehood, she uses his “dialogues” (which are compiled using details gleaned from her own extensive research of personal diaries, newspapers, journals, interviews and other sources), to bring the reader along on her journey back in time.

The result was well worth the experiment with the grey area between nonfiction and fiction.