Finding The Bad Inn

Book review

Writing a book, particularly non-fiction, requires dedication, time, and commitment to get the job done correctly. The book Finding the Bad Inn, written by Butte native Christy Leskovar, describes in detail the amount of work required to thoroughly research a topic and the amount of work she did to produce her first book, High Plains Book Award finalist One Night in a Bad Inn, a book dealing with an incident in her family’s past. Leskovar discovered so much information while researching her first book that she wrote this sequel, Finding the Bad Inn, to detail what it took to write the first book, how she planned it, organized it, and what she wanted to accomplish with the writing.

Leskovar talked to an enormous number of people in tracking down leads and snippets of information about her great grandparents and grandparents. She traveled across the country and around the world to locate documents, talk to locals, see the locations where her ancestors came from, visit the battlefields in Belgium and France on which they fought, and to learn about the culture and the society that shaped these people.

Not only did she investigate documents, get a feel for the location and the times, and talk to people who remembered events, but she also explored homesteading history, discovered more about her hometown of Butte, and delved into the background and history of World War I in order to better understand her roots and her family’s past history. She shares this information in Finding the Bad Inn which makes for an interesting read.

Leskovar fleshes out details that she merely touched upon in her first book. This behind-the-scenes description of how she gathered her original information demonstrates the enormous amount of work required to research and then write a book. In spite of the hard work and time consuming efforts, Leskovar enjoyed herself and learned a lot of forgotten facts about her family. “The research was great fun,” Leskovar says at the end of the book. “Every time I discovered the answer to a question on my to-do list I felt a great sense of accomplishment. Even when my search culminated in a dead end as far as what I set out to find, inevitably I would stumble across something I didn’t know I was looking for. I wouldn’t have missed the good inn that was writing my book. The whole experience was a treasure.”

She also learned that research was only half of the project. She still had to organize the material and write it down in book form. “I finally learned that writing a book is not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” she admits. “No matter how fast I wanted to go, I could only go so fast, and there was nothing I could do about it. How to say this, where to put that – not here, but there, or maybe there.”

Anyone thinking about researching and writing a book should read the epic saga of what it took Leskovar to bring an idea to fruition in a published book. This book makes for interesting reading and lets the reader know how to research, where to research, and the surprises and pleasures one may discover in the process.