If you've ever watched an episode of "Little House on the Prairie hoping it's the one where Laura finally gets Nellie, you'll enjoy the spark of personality found in this book. I like to think of it as Jane Austen plus frontier justice. Set in the early 1900s in the tiny town of Byron, nestled in the Australia's Blue Mountains, it tells of the blossoming of Missy Wright, 33-year-old spinster and poor relation of the town's ruling family, the Hurlingfords. Missy, her widowed mother and crippled aunt live in genteel poverty, victims of the Hurlingford inheritance policy that gives riches and power to the male members of the family, who heartlessly abuse the women they dominate. Plain, painfully thin and doomed to dress always in serviceable brown, shockingly dark-haired in a clan of luminous blondes, Missy seems fated for da dreary future until a distant cousin, a divorcee, arrives from Sydney. Under her tutelage, Missy acquires spunk, hope and the means to a happy ending.
Though these women face misery, they handle it with grace and humor and in the end, courage. I haven't read this book for years, so I borrowed some of the review from Amazon, but I have always loved and remembered it.
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