Gravel Road Musings

  This is Nicole Miller's debut novel and she did a great job. Combining her love of horses and World War II, she painted a picture about a part of the war that I never knew about.  Adia Kensington loves horses, especially the Polish Arabian horses. She moved to Poland to work with them with dreams of taking some to the states to her own horse farm. She inherited this love from her parents, both of whom are deceased. I wish there was a little more information about them and even about Adia's growing up years. You gathered her parents died because of their espionage work, but you aren't totally sure and those questions are never answered. For someone who doesn't love animals, I struggle to understand and appreciate the lengths Adia went to save the horses, and yet they were pure-bred horses of spectacular stock. They had faced decimation in World War I and Poland had worked hard to rebuild its stock only to have both the Russians and Germans come in and take them again. 

  The historic Route 66. I didn't know a lot about it before I read this book and while it was a work of fiction, I understood that some of the places mentioned were real and some still exist.  Written in a dual timeline this is the story of Benny and Paul and their original journey west and of Benny revisiting the sites at an old age after Paul has passed away. Bridger, her foster son, is making a documentary with memories from Benny's original trip. Jade is invited along. Jade was a financial advisor who happened to be working for a company involved in a big Ponzi scheme. Not only working for them, she was engaged to the son of the owner. Obviously, when she turned her fiancee and father in, she was also out of a job, poor, and unemployable because of her connections to the scheme. Jade was Benny's advisor and yet Benny continued to believe in her.  The story was well-written and showed Benny wrestling with the struggle of old age, Bridger wrestling with his roots and los