As WWII rages on, Maisie McCall leaves a judgmental family behind to join up with the Women's Timber Corps as a lumberjill, felling trees in the Scottish Highlands while the men are at war. As she learns to swing an ax and haul lumber, soft and quiet Maisie discovers strengths she never knew she had and forges fast friendships with the girls she meets. She befriends men as well, including John Lindsay, an enigmatic Canadian with the soul of a poet, who refuses to dance on nights out and loses his temper when he's teased for not wearing a soldier's uniform. Maisie and John grow closer despite his walls, but it's not until a logging accident that Maisie truly begins to understand why John keeps her at a distance. WWII romances are not uncommon, but this particular backdrop logging camp in the Scottish Highlands not often portrayed, and is likely to intrigue readers. A slow-burning, character-driven exploration of the lingering scars left by war.

Maisie McCall is lonely when she first leaves home to harvest much-needed timber for the war effort in Scotland's Women's Timber Corps. Soon she's made as many friends as she has calluses on her hands--and she's fallen in love with a wounded Canadian soldier. Leech's somewhat slow fictionalized account of Scottish "lumberjills" during WWII also explores the complexity of forming a relationship with someone coming to terms with a disability.

A teen lumbergirl finds wartime romance in the Scottish Highlands. It's 1942. Seventeen-year-old Margaret "Maisie" McCall sees joining in Great Britain's war effort as an honorable excuse to leave her unhappy home, but since she's too young for the armed services, she signs up for the Women's Timber Corps and becomes a lumberjill. Two weeks into her training she meets a man named John Lindsay at a local dance—he's physically attractive and initially seems kind, but he's clumsy and storms off before their dance is complete. A month later, in her remote first post in the Scottish forest camp of Auchterblair, Speyside, she runs into John again—he's a lumberjack nearby. Weeks into a somewhat awkward romance, Maisie discovers that John has a prosthetic leg, which he's somehow managed to hide from most of his fellow corpsman despite sharing a dormitory with them. Their romance proceeds despite John's basic unlikability. The story unfolds from Maisie's point of view but is told more than shown; the characters feel emotionally inconsistent, and the flat story arc provides little suspense. In alignment with the time and location, it follows a white default. An interesting setting and good use of historical details aren't, in the end, enough to hold reader interest.(Historical fiction. 12-18)