Girl Waits With Gun

This was an enjoyable read. I didn't love it, but the reading experience was fun and it was a well-paced piece of historical fiction.

My main problems with it are two-fold.

1) The very first line of the Goodreads page for this book is: “A novel based on the forgotten true story of one of the nation's first female deputy sheriffs.” Well, Constance Kopp may have been the nation's first female deputy sheriff, but this book is not about her being a sheriff. In fact, POTENTIAL SPOILER BUT NOT REALLY no one mentions that she should become a deputy sheriff until literally the last line of the book, and only after she's proven countless times that she is capable of standing up for herself and her family when a powerful factory owner destroys their property and then tries to threaten and intimidate them to get them to stay quiet about it. Constance Kopp is pretty badass, I just wish they had teased the book better because this was a point of frustration for me. (I kept wondering when she was going to get offered a job, for like the entire book.)

2) My goodness, I get that it's 1914 but the constant references to how the Kopp sisters couldn't POSSIBLY do things on their own because SPINSTERS and WHERE IS YOUR FATHER AND/OR YOUR HUSBANDS, and WHY DON'T YOU JUST MOVE IN WITH YOUR BROTHER'S FAMILY SO YOU CAN BE TAKEN CARE OF, and then they do badass stuff and prove they don't need no stinkin' men, and then everyone is all surprised that women are CAPABLE and HAVEN'T FAINTED in the face of terror. Rawr.

But, those issues aside, it was straight-forward and easy to read, the story didn't lag, and the characters were interesting.