The Last Woman Standing

All style and no substance. The book started with a great premise and great promise -Josephine “Josie” Marcus, a young Jewish woman, leaves her family in San Francisco and runs off to the wilds of Tombstone to become the wife of Johnny Behan, only to discover that he is a two-timing bastard and fall in love instead with the infamous Wyatt Earp. Problem is, Josie has attitude but very little agency. She goes from one man to another without any efforts to make anything of herself (her big accomplishment is becoming a photographer's model). She witnesses but has no role in the legendary shootout at the OK Corral. By the end of the novel she is literally sitting around waiting for a man to come rescue her. Add to that weakness quite a bit of historical liberty (Wyatt Earp was hardly the saint portrayed in these pages, and there is some evidence that Josie spent some time working as a prostitute), the book reads like a bad romance novel (and I love good romance novels). It's a shame because there is not enough known about Jewish women living on the frontier, and this book would have been fascinating if the author had stuck more to the facts without giving it a gilded romantic sheen.