I liked the two main characters, Fiona and Sawyer. I liked Fiona's desire to keep her promise to her sister to raise her niece (even if I wasn't in agreement with how she decided to go about it--but it was a different time in history when not as many options were available to women.) I liked Sawyer's attempts to work his way up from the ground floor but to keep his gentlemanly manners in the process. I'm glad he didn't follow in his father's footsteps.

In most mail order bride books I've read, there's been an agreement between the mail order bride and a man prior to the bride traveling to marry him. I was surprised that several women travelled to answer a newspaper ad (I think it was anyway) without ever corresponding with the man. Apparently several women showed up in answer to his ad and he picked one of them. Fiona was one of the women who answered that ad, but she wasn't the one picked. She stayed in the town because she'd been fleeing an untrue story that tarnished her reputation.

Fiona seemed to feel that she needed to snag a rich man in order for her to support her niece. I'm not sure why that was. I guess partly because she came from poverty and feared going back to it--and didn't want her niece to have to go through that as well. In fact, given that Fiona seemed to ignore her sisters growing up (she sang louder to drown them out), I'm surprised she even considered raising her niece--but maybe the girl's voice had something to do with it. (Fiona maybe wanted to train her or give her better opportunities than Fiona herself had.)

From the way the back cover was written, I thought Sawyer was going to turn out to be a bit like "Undercover Boss". He was a manager at the mill and for some reason, I thought his family were the mill owners and that he was determined to learn the business from the ground up and didn't want to tell his coworkers that he was the boss's son. Instead, we learn that his father owns a railroad.

I don't understand why Sawyer felt it wasn't the right time to get married (even though he was interested in Fiona). I also didn't understand why it took them both so long to act on their interest in each other. In that aspect, I think the author employed a plot common to this genre. ( )