Who Have the Power

by Mary Sheeran

Elisabeth Barclay, a young suffragist in 1866, is appalled to learn she is half Washo and unaware she is anxiously watched by that tribe and by Masete, the brilliant warrior to whom she was promised. Her struggles with her sense of justice and scorn for her mother's people, increasingly powerful visions by their lake, Tahoe, and growing attraction to Masete come to a head in a battle during which Elisabeth discovers she must claim her role in an ancient prophecy that transcends time.

364 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2006

About the author

My first novel, "Who Have the Power," began when, after studying women's history, I wanted to explore why there was such a discrepancy between the world of, say, the American West as depicted in movies and television and what actually happened.

I focused on the Comstock Lode because I had grown up with the television show, "Bonanza." This series, entertaining as it was, got almost everything wrong about women of the West, about the Comstock Lode, and many other things. It took considerable time to write it, as women's stories began coming into libraries in the late 1980s and the 1990s. What took longer were stories of Native American women of the small tribes in California. Not that there is all that much now. The book both criticizes the invisibility of these people to popular depictions of the West and tells a story of how economic plundering just hurts everybody - but the truth will emerge eventually.

My second novel, "Quest of the Sleeping Princess," also began with a fascination - of the ballet choreographer George Balanchine. The story concerns a woman who is tending her dying mother, and her one respite is to go to the ballet. She creates a fantasy world that mirrors the Sleeping Beauty, and through the novel, I write about imagination and how Balanchine created his own world.

When I am not writing, I am singing or performing in some way. I've played leads in "Brigadoon," "Stop the World," "Picnic," "Cabaret," and in off Broadway plays in New York, where I also sang leads in small opera companies: Mimi in "La Boheme," Norina in "Don Pasquale," Marie in "La Fille du Regiment." I've sung many recital programs and lots of cabaret shows. The last cabaret show I did featured Tom Lehrer's songs. Then I went home to start working on "Banished." That took about six years - watching movies, researching the blacklist, revising, revising, and finally, done!

Meanwhile, a friend, Cate Simon, had gotten a contract for her historical romance, "Courting Anna." I had a romance sitting in my computer - for about ten years. I had gotten a series of rejections and then, as usually happened with me, gone singing. So I hunted the romance down and - it's really a historical romance, as there's a lot of history in it. It's related to "Who Have the Power" and I wrote it, perhaps, to try my hand at a romance and realizing that no one was reading WHTP. I found the book and started reading and couldn't put it down - I couldn't remember how I'd ended the thing. This book was contracted by Prairie Rose Publications, and it's name is "A Dangerous Liberty." It won the Romance category of the 2020 Independent Press Awards, and to my surprise, has gotten some enthusiastic readers. So if you have a manuscript hiding in your computer, do resurrect it!

Reviews

[Kristi Duarte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating, beautifully written story about an independent young socialite in the 19th century who discovers she is half Native American. Oh the horror! Her peers nod at this new revelation and say they now understand why she was always acting so wild. It even takes the main character, Elizabeth Barclay, a long time to accept and appreciate her roots and fall in love with her heritage.

Elizabeth's narrative is blended with a story about a handful of women in current-day USA, who visit a farm where a television series about the Wild West was filmed. One of the main characters in the series was called Elizabeth Barclay. But every woman's recollection of Elizabeth is different. Whose memory is correct? And was Elizabeth really a character in the show?

I loved the dreaminess of this book, the sense that I don't really know what's going on, but I still want to see what happens. The writing is amazing and the characters vivid. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in Native American legends.

The only negative is the formatting of the Kindle version. It's a mess! The author should definitely consider republishing with a better version.

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Western that addresses the erasure of Native Americans and women from history and from pop culture depictions -- a needed corrective! Sheeran also brings her backgrounds in music and theology into the mix, for a very thoughtful work.