Lael Click is the daughter of frontiersman Ezekiel Click, who lived with the Shawnees for several years before returning home to his family. He is quite a legend, and Lael is determined to be very much her own woman as well. At a time when the frontier was a very wild place indeed, she has many trials to face, including being sent away to become a lady and facing up to her lack of religious faith. She is not without suitors, either, from her childhood sweetheart, to visits from a Shawnee brave and a handsome doctor whose skills challenge her own herbal remedies at the local fort.

All that makes this sound like an action-packed tale, but actually this one takes its time, describing at length what it was like to live on the frontier in those days. This author is adept at that, showing the pace of life in the homesteads and the local fort, the remedies the people used and their daily cares and joys. Zeke Click is just a man to his family, but resented by many local people and a legend to everybody else, while Lael tries to live life on her own terms both alone and at the fort. I particularly enjoyed the way in which the slow, almost tedious lives of the settlers were described in the same manner, while the brief bursts of action or epidemic were told in a much more vibrant manner. The end leaves many possibilities, all of them interesting, so I do hope that this is the first in a series. I don’t feel ready to take my leave of Lael just yet...