Belle is a young eastern Colorado pioneer enthralled by her new home. Her older sister Carrie is not quite as happy—she loved their old home in green, heavily-settled Iowa. The life of dry earth farmers in the early 1900s was exceedingly tough, and the family of nine struggles. When illness claims the girls’ mother and younger sister, the future seems precarious, especially Carrie’s hope to go to college and become a teacher. Plucky Belle, though, won’t give up and a community of disparate settlers—a lonely hermit, a generous ranching family, a lively bachelorette homesteader—come together to help.

Perseverance, that eternal ethos of settler sagas, is personified in Belle, who even schemes at matchmaking. The standard plot points of many pioneer stories are touched on: plagues of locusts, blizzards, and even a solitary bad guy scared off by intrepid heroines. Dallas, a prolific author of adult westerns, and a Spur Award winner, has written a story young readers drawn to historical fiction like the Little House series will find satisfying.

A close-knit family endures the rough life of farming in Colorado in the early 20th century. Hail, snow, locusts, sickness, death—the list of setbacks encountered by the Martin family as they try to earn their homestead by farming the dry ground of Colorado is a long one. But they can depend on one another for love and support, and they rely on their friendly neighbors for everything from food when times are especially tight to a helping hand in a snowy emergency. And it’s not all hardship. There are fun parties, plans for college, and holiday celebrations. Told from the point of view of 12-year-old Belle, who is pleased to discover that their nearest neighbor is a woman on her own, proving that women can be independent homesteaders, the details of rural American life are rendered with care and precision in Dallas’ third novel for children. The story occasionally offers events that feel too convenient and even saccharine, as when neighbor Hans Kruger saves the children from a snowstorm and thus proves himself to be a kind and generous soul, far from the dangerous German immigrant most thought him to be. A white cast of characters populates this book set in the 1910s, with obvious parallels to the Little House series. A traditional addition to the genre of frontier living. (Historical fiction. 9-11)