Annie and the Wolves

I'll admit, I don't know much about Annie Oakley.

But a historical fiction book about her happened to catch my eye, so I grabbed a copy. That being said, I have no idea how much of her story was changed for this book, but the main character is a historian who has dedicated the last few years of her life to researching Annie Oakley. So I'm hoping it's fairly accurate.....

Annie of the Wolves in told through several different timelines by several different characters. The most important two are Annie Oakley and Ruth McClintock. Ruth is contacted by Nieman, a man looking into buying letters written by Annie Oakley but first wants to know the authenticity of them. He mails Ruth a journal that seems to be written by a psychoanalyst. The curious thing about this journal is when the doctor begins writing notes for patient ZN, an American woman who begins discussing her childhood; a childhood that sounds very similar to the one Annie Oakley wrote about in her unfinished memoir. In a moment of angst, Ruth tells the man not to bother buying the letters, they're obviously fake.

Days later, Ruth realizes she jumped the gun a bit and tries to research Annie's psychotherapy sessions a bit more before trying to get Nieman to purchase the letters. Along the way, Ruth is discovering new things about herself, her late sister, and even Annie. The parallels are uncanny when it comes to the violent events both Ruth and Annie survived. But that doesn't mean we should have been introduced to time travel more than halfway into the book.

Yeah, this happened.

I had heard a few things about it while reading reviews of the book but I thought, there's no way it can be that important for the book......but the entire second half of the book detailed Ruth trying to prove that time travel is possible and that she and Annie could both exist in multiple timelines. It was almost as if "what if" became fact and literally changed the course of history. The second half of the book still had a ton of information that I enjoyed reading, including the letters Nieman finally sent over to Ruth. But the time travel aspect of this book really was kind of frustrating.

Overall though, it's a pretty good book and I definitely will be reading more from this author.