As a young girl during the Civil War, Rosa was sent to Philadelphia, where she studied mathematics and astronomy. By chance, she was introduced to Edward, a wealthy lawyer. They were married and had a son, Daniel. The marriage was very unhappy for Rosa and she knew right away it was a mistake. But this was in the late 19th century and there were not many options for a woman. When Edward committed serious sexual abuse on her then teenage son, she saw no more options but escape.

Guardian tells of their travels and adventures to get away from the abusive husband and father while staying ahead of the private investigators he sent to catch them. Their journey took them first to Missouri, but soon on to San Francisco, Seattle and the Alaska wilderness during the gold rush.

Seemingly guiding her is a guardian which appears to her as a raven that speaks.

Guardian reads like a journal for most of the story, until the raven takes on a mystical persona that results in some time travel by Rosa which allows her to “do it over again” and change a bit of history along the way.

I enjoy Haldeman’s writing very much and I have read and reviewed a number of his books. You can find the reviews in my Book Reviews list. Haldeman is a science fiction writer, of course, with the classic The Forever War being one of my favorites. In this book he veers off into an entirely different direction and I found the alternate history portion of the story distracting.

In my real life, in late August, we were just in Alaska, and we visited Juneau and Skagway, two of the places that play a major role in the story of Guardian. Seeing how those exotic places came into existence through the Alaskan gold rush, and what they were like before modern cruise ships deposited thousands of tourists into them on an ongoing basis was fascinating to me. I enjoyed the descriptions of their ship working its way through some of the narrows between the islands that I was watching more than a hundred years later from the balcony of our cabin during our voyage. Sometimes old books and modern life connect in mysterious ways.