Deeply researched and lovingly told, Howard's soft, accessible style frames Charlotte's journey from high Victorian society to a voyage aboard an English "brideship" to begin life in a land equally treacherous and beautiful.


I enjoyed the balance of travails and triumphs, small moments of grace and the embrace of humanity. While never shying away from presenting the limited opportunities afforded women in the 19th Century (often worth more as bartering chips than human beings) Howard still provides readers with a warm, slow-burn romance and a salient treatise on hope and the human spirit.


A note that I am so excited that this publisher is making room for quality Canadian historical fiction. It serves us so well to find voices who open the doors to lesser known parts of our past.


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What attracted me to the book in the first place was its subject matter - I didn’t know that England had shipped women over to BC to be married and I thought it made for a compelling premise, and it does. However, I found most of the characters shallow and unlikeable, including the main character, Charlotte who, despite being 21, conducts and speak as if she were 40.

By focusing on a upper-class woman instead of on a woman of more modest means, I think the author lost a great opportunity to turn her good novel into a great one. Her upper-class characters are villainous to the point of caricature and the various scandals attached to them are rushed and overused. I’d much rather have read an entire novel focusing on Sarah, a secondary character who befriends Charlotte on the way over.

The language is a bit stilted at the beginning, but the flow gets better as the book progresses, but I expect that more editing should take care of that prior to publication.