Rhett Gallagher is a badass. She can fix the fuse in a car that won’t start or slow down a runaway horse. She’s been all over the world, figuring out how to pull a minicab or work in a fishery or help out on a ranch. And she wrote it all down, in a book she called The Modern Pioneer Girl’s Guide to Life, published under the pseudonym Maggie Strong. Rhett was very happy being The Modern Pioneer Girl on Instagram and Rhett working on a ranch in South America.
And then her grandmother died.
Bee had lived on a farm in New Hampshire, and Rhett grew up on the farm with her. She had learned from Bee and from her father, until he had died from a tragic accident. Her mother had lived with them on the farm, but she was from England and felt more at home on the local college campus than on the farm. She had left the farm when Rhett was 11 and never went back. And then, when her father died, her mother picked Rhett up and sent her to boarding school. Rhett was heartbroken, but that’s where she met Jasmine.
Jasmine had been the girl a school who saw her. She saw Rhett hiding from the other girls, reading her Little House on the Prairie books. She is the one who encouraged Rhett to channel her inner Pioneer Girl, and their friendship was cemented from that point on.
Jas is Rhett’s first stop in New York, as they get a chance to get caught up in the city before Rhett heads to New Hampshire and the farm. And when they post on Instagram, someone from the Today Show happens to recognize the photo and asks The Modern Pioneer Girl to do the show in the morning. While Rhett likes to stay anonymous, she agrees to do the show. But what she doesn’t realize until she shows up at the green room is that the piece is about the traditional advice of going to college and slowly building a career step by step versus The Modern Pioneer Girl’s advice of finding your own path. And the person they have scheduled to talk about the traditional route? A college president. Specifically, Rhett’s mother.
Rhett panics and decides she can’t go on. She begs Jas to take her place instead. Against her better judgment, Jas agrees, and she is delightful on the show. But Margaret, Rhett’s mother, doesn’t do as well. And while the offers for more media come rolling in, Rhett begs off and heads to her grandmother’s farm. When she gets there, she finds her mother there waiting for her. It turns out that Rhett’s grandmother didn’t own the farm. She had been allowed to live there, but the farm was actually owned by her father. When he had passed, it had gone to her mother and herself, with her mother acting as trustee.
Rhett’s mother is prepared to sell the farm to the college, so that they can build a new admissions building. But Rhett insists that she wants to stay and run the farm. Her mother doubts that she can do it, but she doesn’t realize that The Modern Pioneer Girl has all the skills she needs to run a working farm. But first she’ll have to convince her mother to sell her half of the farm to her, convince her college boyfriend that she’s not the same girl who left him shortly before graduation, and find a way to make money for the farm to make repairs and keep the animals—some chickens, horses, and a llama, among others—fed and safe.
The Modern Pioneer Girl could pull all that off, but now that the world thinks that’s Jasmine, Rhett has painted herself into a corner. She will need to figure out how to fix all her past relationship mistakes or she’ll just end up burning it all down.
In Her Boots is the latest novel from KJ Dell’Antonia, who brought us last year’s The Chicken Sisters. This new novel is a powerful look at the relationships that make us and break us and how our perspective on them changes through the years. Dell’Antonia takes readers on a journey through broken relationships to hope and healing.
I absolutely loved this book. There is an energy to Rhett and her story that is so propulsive and dynamic that I had a hard time setting this book aside. I loved these characters and how they hunkered down when things got hard. They didn’t always make the best choices, but they got it right in the end. I am so impressed by the way Dell’Antonia handles the emotions of these characters, giving this book a texture of genuine humanity and heart. This one is a big win for me, and I think anyone needing a heart-warming, genuinely interesting read should pick this one up immediately.
Egalleys for In Her Boots were provided by G.P. Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks.
