About the Book

Book: Rocky Mountain Journey (Sisters of the Rockies: Book 3)

Author: Misty M. Beller

Genre: Christian Historical Romance

Release date: June 18, 2024

Masquerading as a man, Faith Collins embarks on a perilous journey through the untamed wilderness of the Rocky Mountains in search of the Peigan Blackfoot woman who once saved her father’s life. She joins a group of trappers who may be able to lead her to the place the woman is hiding, but keeping Faith’s identity a secret proves more difficult than she imagined.

Grant Allen is searching for his younger brother, who was separated from him when their parents died many years ago. After receiving word that his brother went west to the Rockies, he unites with a group of trappers, hoping they can lead him to his brother’s location. Soon Grant realizes there’s a woman hiding among the men, and he’s determined to find out who she is, what she’s hiding, and how he can keep her safe in this country of wild animals and even wilder men.

In this rousing conclusion to her Sisters of the Rockies series, Misty M. Beller embarks on an adventurous journey where loyalty, love, and sacrifice intertwine amid the unforgiving frontier.

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About the Author

Misty M. Beller is a USA Today bestselling author of romantic mountain stories, set on the 1800s frontier and woven with the truth of God’s love.

Raised on a farm and surrounded by family, Misty developed her love for horses, history, and adventure. These days, her husband and children provide fresh adventure every day, keeping her both grounded and crazy.

Misty’s passion is to create inspiring Christian fiction infused with the grandeur of the mountains, writing historical romance that displays God’s abundant love through the twists and turns in the lives of her characters.

Sharing her stories with readers is a dream come true for Misty. She writes from her country home in South Carolina and escapes to the mountains any chance she gets.

My thoughts:

As expected, this addition to the series is beautifully written and descriptive, with well-thought out characters. The journey to find Steps Right, a Native American woman who saved the father of four sisters decades ago continues.

Except, at this point in th story, the search has halted because of many unexpected circumstances, including 2 sisters marrying, one giving birth, and another now pregnant. Littlest sister Faith is desperate to find her father’s savior. She after all, would not be alive if not for Steps Right. Because Steps Right saved her father, he was able to return to his wife, and then Faith was born shortly afterward.

I spent most of the book, unfortunately, not liking Faith. Through the first installments in the series, we see only a little of Faith’s character development, but overall, to me, she seemed so sweet, so quiet, so generous and caring and willing to do whatever needed to be done for her family she loved so much. That is not the Faith I found in this story.

If you don’t like spoilers, this is where you should stop reading: You’ve been warned. Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom and enter the giveaway!

I totally get that it was during an era where life was very different, and most people were very, very accustomed to hard work. But when Faith decided, on a rather impulsive whim, to go in search of Steps Right ALONE – leaving her oldest sister to care for two pregnant women and a toddler, and manage a very newly established ranch, that seemed a lot unfair.

She also abruptly left her horse training responsibilities, which were a source of income for the ranch. And while there were 2 other men on the ranch, one of them (a Native friend of the family) actually followed her. So unless they’d hired some ranch hands that weren’t mentioned, I find it ridiculous that Faith left her sisters alone and lied, to multiple people, before traveling off on her own into the wilderness.

And when that first attempt didn’t work, she dressed up like a guy and traveled with a bunch of fur trappers just to find this other Native, at the very high risk of harm to herself. Worse, none of her family knew where she was, because she’d lied to them AND to other people she’d also been traveling with. If this had only been a story about her dressing up in disguise, and none of the other lying had taken place beforehand, I’d have been much less irritated.

Enter Grant: A much, much more likeable character. I enjoyed his side of the story, and I’m relieved they didn’t keep up the pretending-to-be-a-guy charade for very long. All in all, the wrap up near the end was sweet, but it took me 3/4 of reading through this story to care about the outcome.

Regardless of this read through, I am excited about the fourth book which hopefully will enlighten us about Rosie and White Horse, which I anticipate to be a great story.

More from Misty

A HEROINE DISGUISED AS A MAN

I love a heroine in disguise! It’s one of my favorite tropes, but I don’t often get to write stories with that plot. It adds so many fun and funny moments to the storyline.

In Rocky Mountain Journey our heroine goes undercover as a “man” to travel with a group of trappers so she can reach her destination safely. Numbers meant a better chance of survival back in those days. I love that Grant, our hero, was the only man in the trapper group who looked close enough at the young “man” riding with them to realize things weren’t what they seemed at first glance.

One challenge that definitely arises in a story where the heroine is pretending to be a man is the development of the romance between her and the hero. In this case, Faith was pretending to be her (fictitious) brother Frank. Grant had met Faith in an earlier chapter before she took on the disguise, and he immediately noticed the resemblance between “Frank” and the woman whose memory still lingered with him, even days later. Every time he looks at “Frank” while they’re traveling with the trappers, he recalls the memory of Faith by the waterfall…and the attraction to that woman grows a little more every time. What a shocking surprise when he discovered she’s riding just ahead of him on the trail the entire time!

I pray you love Faith’s stint “in disguise” in Rocky Mountain Journey!

Blessings!

Misty