“Good Morning, Young Lady” by Ardyth Kennelly is the only book I’ve read more than a dozen times. At age 12 I got my hands on this musty old hardcover, dust jacket missing, after my mom’s stepmother died. Did she love this novel as much as I did? I can picture her in that stucco house with plastered walls, a built-in bookcase, and hardwood floors, but I cannot recall her ever talking literature with us. Mom’s father was a bricklayer with an eighth-grade education but he could pass for a college grad, he had read so many lofty books. Aristotle. Plato. Browning. He died when I was five. I never heard him share his thoughts on books but I did, somehow, inherit his love of reading.
What made this obscure 1953 novel so captivating for an adolescent reading it for the first time in 1975? Why do I keep revisiting this story half a century later? Do I really need someone else to share my love for this Cinderella story set in the Old West, to talk about the cast of characters as if they were our friends and neighbors? Like a zealot, I would buy out-of-print copies online and send them to friends and relatives. Not one of them none liked the book. I felt so alone–until a man named Frank in Utah outbid me on eBay. I found his email address and we corresponded ….
…. And I’ve had some technical difficulties with WordPress and will come back to this another day.
carolkean 
Carol–I left you a long comment on this the day it appeared, but guess that comment has disappeared into the ether! So I’ll try again.
I still adore this novel, and I have ALSO read the biography you referenced about Butch Cassidy–and I was equally shocked to read the reference to a young lady he fell in love with! I guess you never know.
Ardyth Kennelly wrote additional historical fiction which I genuinely loved, including THE SPUR, about John Wilkes Booth, which had some surprising new info that I’d never seen before (and I wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln and spent a lot of time on the assassination and its aftermath).
Anyway, still loving this and still thinking it could be brought to life in another form. I’ve never forgotten my desire to do that. And of course, so happy I met you as a result!
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Susan, I’m sorry you saw this horrible, mangled attempt at revising my first blog post on GMYL – your comment should still be there – now I’m trying to delete this post and restore the old one. Thank you for your kind words and your mutual love of GMYL. Tomorrow maybe I’ll try again to fix this mess…. WordPress! HTML….
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