In 1917, Wallace, Idaho, was the jewel of the silver belt with elegant brick buildings, paved roads, and electric street lamps. Two families, the Fosters and the Connors, settle in Wallace to raise their children. As the years pass, Jim and Lucy Foster watch their four sons Earl, George, Clyde and Mo work the mines and struggle to become men. Contentious eighteen-year-old Earl has just graduated from high school and begun working fulltime in the silver mines. With spare cash, he discovers the pleasures of whiskey and women but is obsessed with the beautiful green-eyed Bertie Connor and wants her for his wife. Before he can cross the threshold to manhood, he must learn to accept the truth about his own shortcomings while dealing with wild animals, gangs of thugs, and mysterious kidnappings. Silver Womb, the exciting sequel to Grave Talker, continues the Foster saga in an unforgettable tale about a time in America when men used their brute strength and courage to forge a living from the silver mines amid the unforgiving Bitterroot Mountains of the Idaho panhandle. Love and gross bodily trauma roil this coming-of-age drama. The first calamity to trouble the silver-mining town of Wallace, Idaho in the year 1917 is a bear attack that leaves town hellion Earl Foster badly mauled. Fortunately, claw wounds and a crushed ankle barely slow him down. A magnetic youth who embodies the raw vitality of the West, with his gargantuan appetites for food, work, whiskey and whores, the only thing that can sap his energies is his courtship of town beauty Bertie. Widen (Grave Talker, 2005) has a good feel for period detail, and she effectively captures the atmosphere of a mining boom-town, as well as the uneasy shoulder-rubbing of genteel homes and churches with rough-hewn saloons, brothels and overcrowded boardinghouses. An absorbing family saga. -Kirkus Discoveries