At age seventeen Tam Bowen left her Montana home in disgrace after giving birth to a son out of wedlock. After working her way through college, she settled in Portland, Oregon, where she began making a living for herself and her son by writing soft-porn romance novels. Now, at fifty, Tam is estranged from her son and deeply depressed. She has returned to the cabin in Montana's Snowy Mountains where she grew up, to ponder the choices she has made in her life. At first dismayed by the many changes she finds in the mountain community, Tam gradually makes a few friends and becomes increasingly involved in the lives of two troubled teenagers, who draw her back into the horsemanship she turned away from so many years ago. For Tam, horses provide a sense of stability amid the uncertainty of her new-old life and expose the vulnerability of all the folks who struggle with the vagaries of a tough place.

Mary Clearman Blew is the author or editor of numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including the three previous novels in her Montana quartet: Waltzing Montana (set in 1925), Sweep Out the Ashes (set in 1975), and Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin (set in 2012), all published by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita of English at the University of Idaho and has won numerous awards, including the Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement Award.