In the tradition of the film Titanic comes a historical romance about a life-changing experience at the hands of a young man from a decidedly different upbringing. Contemporary British teenager Hope flies off with her mother to spend the summer in the Montana wilderness, only to find herself falling for Cal, the 18-year-old cowboy with a mysterious past. While there, she discovers the diary of a young British woman, Emily, who passes through the same wilderness in 1867, before falling victim to a terrible coach accident and being rescued by a half-Indian Civil War deserter. Though more than a hundred years separate these two young women, there's much that they have in common, which Hope discovers by reading Emily's journal, which is included in alternating chapters. In evocative, detail-rich prose, Inglis successfully brings readers into a fascinating period in Montana's early history. Though the present chapters build to a somewhat hard-to-swallow ending, there is much to admire in Emily's and Hope's parallel journeys of self-discovery.

The parallel stories of rescue, love, and burgeoning self-reliance, 150 years apart, of two refined 16-year-old white English girls whose lives are changed in the American West by young, rugged, sensitive pioneers/cowboys with secrets. In the present-day (and in the third person), Hope Cooper and her mother travel to a Montana ranch for research, lodging with the Crows, Caleb and his hardworking, handsome 19-year-old son, Cal. In 1867 and recounted in a diary/letter addressed to "you" that Hope finds in the barn loft, Emily Forsythe describes traveling by stagecoach through Montana toward an arranged marriage in Oregon. When the coach crashes, only Emily survives, rescued by Nate, a captivating blue-eyed horse trader and railway scout. In alternating chapters, Hope's and Emily's engrossing stories mirror each other (as do Cal's and Nate's), from injury to adjustment to the wilderness, coping with injustice, their first kisses, and beyond. Danger lurks at every turn in this sweeping and suspenseful romance, but its history is not well-integrated. Inglis packs in too much of her research, dropping in issues without really developing them, including women's subservient status; that of Nate's Apsáalooke family and his half sister, Rose, who is "two spirits in one body, a man and a woman"; the near-extinction of the bison; bullying. Still, the romances (with all their implausibilities) take precedence, and readers will be caught up with Emily's and Hope's exciting journeys. (Fiction/historical fiction. 14-18)

Hope West is just sixteen when she travels from her home in London to Montana where her mum will study the ecosystem of the Broken Bit Ranch. Her begrudging participation becomes healthy enthusiasm when nineteen-year-old, super-hot Caleb Crow collects Hope and her mother from the Helena airport. One hundred and fifty years earlier, Emily Forsythe, a fifteen-year-old betrothed to the son of a railroad baron, embarks on a similar journey. Told in alternating chapters, the girls' paths are eerily similar. Both encounter a young, handsome cowboy with a mysterious past. Both experience a catastrophic event that forces them to endure extreme and isolating circumstances with this cowboy, and for both, their Montana experience becomes life-changing, despite the fierce protection of adults who would have it otherwise.Inglis has done some research to invoke Emily's picturesque tale with plenty of historical facts, which adds texture to the telling. Less rich is Hope's story, which is flat and predictable. Unfortunately, Inglis's drive to make the girls' stories recognizably parallel is too heavy-handed. The fierce and ever-suspicious chaperone who travels with Emily across the lawless frontier need not be mirrored by Hope's mother's modern feminism. In the minds of most teenseven teens who would like their parents to hover a little lessthis comparison rings false. Similarly, while marriages between adolescent girls and older men were not uncommon in the nineteenth century, serious relationships between modern sixteen-year-olds and older men are unrealistic at best and unlawful at worst. If Inglis hoped to write a story about two independent young women who heroically confront extreme circumstances, with a healthy bit of sexual tension in the mix, she got it only half right. Unfortunately, the failure of the modern teenwho ultimately reads as self-absorbed and entirely dependent on others' estimation of herundermines the whole construction. Inglis should have kept her story in the Victorian Age.Lauri J. Vaughan.