Maggie doesn't know it, but she has been adopted. Her mother gave birth on the wagon train to triplets and then died. Overcome with grief, her father gives away two of the children to be adopted. Florence has always wanted a child, but God hadn't answered that prayer to her satisfaction. Now Maggie feels that her mother is trying to push her into a mold and be someone that she's not. The tensions get extremely high when Maggie wears a dress that belonged to her mother at her eighteenth birthday party. When Maggie finds the dress, she also finds the adoption papers.
Maggie has been wanting to go to Arkansas and meet her grandmother for a long time. Her parents finally agree, and Maggie is glad, because she needs the time to gather her feelings and decide how she feels about being lied to her entire life. The good news is that her childhood friend, Charles, and her aunt are coming with her to chaperone. Maggie wants Charles to see that she's grown up and not his little sister, but a woman.
Charles, on the other hand, takes one look at Maggie's aunt and is completely smitten. On the long train ride from Seattle, Maggie has to watch Charles flirt shamelessly with her aunt while watching her hopes dashed and her heart ripped out.
I'll admit that I skipped most of the second half of this book. I was completely annoyed with the "relationship" between the aunt and Charles. I realize that she was only 31 and that's not too old to get married to Charles number-wise, but the thought that he was pursuing a peer's aunt was creepy in thought and it kept bothering me. I also wasn't a big fan of the incredible detail of the trip itself. I normally like learning about things like that, but I'm not sure what it was about this book that put me off. I think it was the overabundance of detail.
There are two more books in the series, one for each of the other two daughters. Mary's Blessing is book two and follows the other adopted daughter. The third book, Catherine's pursuit, came out in February. I don't plan on tracking them, I have too many books that I'm tracking already and I wasn't involved in this book the way I wanted to be. If you're looking to find out a lot about rail travel back when it wasn't necessarily comfortable, this would be a great book for you. For some reason, I just had too many issues getting into it.
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