Release Date: May 31, 2016
Publisher: The Chicken House
Pages: 414
Genre: Young Adult, Historical Fiction, American Western, Romance
Summary
A sweeping tale of love, legacy, and wilderness set between present day and 1866 in the dramatic landscape of modern-day and territorial Montana.
While on a trip to Montana with her mom, British teen Hope meets local boy Cal Crow, a ranch hand. Caught in a freak accident, Hope and Cal take shelter in a cabin, where Hope makes a strange discovery in an abandoned diary. More than a hundred years earlier, another British girl--Emily--met a similar fate. Her rescuer, a horse trader named Nate. In this wild place, both girls learn what it means to survive and to fall in love, neither knowing that their fates are intimately entwined. -Goodreads description
The Rundown
I really liked this book! It was such a wonderful, feel good story that I barely put it down!
You probably get tired of hearing me say how much I love historical fiction, but when it's done well, you not only get to visit a new place but you also get to time travel! How cool are books?!
This is a place and time I haven't seen a lot of in recent YA historical fiction, but I'd love to see more! America in the immediate years following the Civil War had a lot going on, particularly west of the Mississippi River. The real, old, wild wild west! Pioneers pushing west over the Rockies. Ranchers and farmers settling over the Plains states. Native American tribes still trying to hold on to their lands and way of life. Buffalo were being killed off at an alarming rate. Outposts and army camps the only specks of civilization in some parts.
I could ramble on (I watched an alarming amount of Clint Eastwood movies with my dad as a kid) but let's talk about this book!
The story alternates between Hope and Cal Crow in the present day and excerpts from Emily's diary detailing the story of herself and Nate Crow in 1867 Montana. Both girls are strong, smart, and at an age where they're trying to find a voice and footing in their own lives as they near adulthood.
Both girls are also less than thrilled to be in Montana...at first. Emily is passing through en route from London to Portland, where her parents have arranged her marriage to a young railroad tycoon. Hope is accompanying her mother, a scientist, to a remote Montana ranch to study the ecosystem there.
History has a way of repeating itself as Emily and Nate, and later Hope and Cal, find love and themselves as they survive in the Montana wilderness.
Give yourself over to a little bit of fantasy with the experiences both couples share, and this story will captivate you from beginning to end. It also paints an accurate picture of racial tensions between natives and settlers, as well as the horrors of the buffalo hunted to near extinction on the Great Plains.
And if you don't fall in love with Nate...sigh.
This may be the top of my list of 2016 books I'd love to see made into a movie!
Rating: 4.5 stars! So good!
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