Into the Bright Unknown by Rae Carson

I have read all of the books in the Gold Seer trilogy and have loved them. This third and last installment was no exception. In Book One we see Leah's journey across this vast continent that we live in to make her way to California where the gold and land is plentiful. Putting her life on the line and lending a hand wherever she can, she is reunited with friends and makes it to her destination. She finds, though, in Book Two, that she may not be as safe in California as she thought she might be. Enemies from home follow her and pose a problem to both her and her friends. With the help of her friends she is able to get back her own freedom and the safety for her friends and new family.

In Book Three Leah is faced with a problem that seems to be much larger than she anticipated. Things in California are not quite as fair as she had hoped. There is one man who is buying up all the land and selling it or renting it for much more than it was worth and causing people to spend all of their life's savings. On top of that, this same man is making it hard for her friend Becky to retrieve property that is rightfully hers. One thing I had to keep reminding myself as I was reading this is that California was not a state yet. It was still just a territory. I was shocked by the descriptions sometimes of the crime and lawlessness of the area, but again, the US laws didn't really matter much at the time and that's why the man that Leah and her friends ultimately bring down is able to get away with as much as he does. That and the fact that mail and news took months to get to California making it hard for laws to be carried out and making it easy for men with money to take advantage of others without.

One of the reasons that I absolutely love these books is because of Leah. She is such a strong female character and, unlike other books in this same genre, she doesn't automatically turn to the nearest male figure in her life. Her parents are both killed at the beginning of the series, so instead of turning to someone else, she takes her life into her own hands and goes further than even she had imagined she could. Because of the time period and the fact that women were considered the fairer (and therefore weaker) sex, she does spend a great deal of the first book disguised as a young man, but once she proves herself to the people she considers friends, she goes back to being herself. 

This is also a time period that you don't see a whole lot in YA writing. I feel that most of the time I see some kind of dystopian version of the what our country will look like in the future or present day. Or if it is historical, it's of an earlier time period. I loved learning a little more about the Gold Rush and the Westward Expansion of our country.