In the High Valley

The fifth and last Katy book opens in an old red-brick grange on the North Devon coast, where Imogen Young, prim and certain that nothing good comes out of America, sets out with her brother Lionel for a ranch in a high valley of Colorado. There she meets Clover, now married to Geoff Templestowe, and the rest of the Carr family at home in the mountains, and the prejudices wear away one at a time. Susan Coolidge closed the series with an English girl learning the West, and the mountains are described by someone who had been there and taken notes on the flowers. Fifty-six plates by Albert Bierstadt and George Inness carry the mountain light and open country that Imogen rides into, from the foothills to the Sierra lakes.