Spirited Gal from the Git-go
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The central character is one Michaela Campos, who knew from the time she was a small girl that she was more like her father than like her mother. She adored her father Agustín and gravitated to his world, identifying more closely with him and other men than with her mother. And she would go everywhere with Agustín—even to Miss Elsie’s, where little girls weren’t supposed to see what big people were doing.

She was with him in the days after the battle at the Alamo, when her father discovered his brother Lorenzo dead of battle wounds. In anguish, Agustín buried Michaela’s uncle and rode off for revenge and more battles, leaving Michaela to watch over the ranch, her mami, and her twin siblings Rusty and Ifigenia. But Michaela couldn’t allow her papi to fight alone, so she went after him, only to arrive too late at his last battle site, where she encountered only carnage and found her papi dead. Grief-stricken, she returned to the ranch, where she found the twins murdered and Mami raped.

So, she ran. Wrapping her body tightly and wearing her papi’s buckskin coat, carrying his rifle and the knife that killed him, she ran, hiding her femaleness and looking for the men who had started the blood feud: a man named Rove, who called himself a colonel, and her cousin Jedidiah Jones, who had always put Michaela down. Along the trail, she met a thief on a burro who took everything she had. She aimed to find them and kill them all. What she never aimed to do was fall in love. But then she met the beautiful Clara, who had hair to her waist and a bright smile and was smart and confident. Michaela couldn’t reveal her love but could only watch as Clara fell for one of the men that Michaela was seeking to kill.

Filled with lush beauty, harshness, and horrifying brutality, this is one of those books in which you just know what’s going to happen at the end—but you’re wrong. Also satisfying is the character development in this book. To watch Michaela grow from a confused, somewhat shy girl to a confused woman with cojones is mighty fine, and the supporting characters are nice complements. As Michaela finds herself and gains frontier-worthy street smarts, you genuinely care about what happens to her, which makes it easier to stick with what can sometimes be too much action. Some may scoff at the small-world character of the plotline, in which the same characters seem to meet up again and again, but keep in mind that this novel is set in a time when the population of the Texas wilderness was very small.

Author Emma Perez says in her acknowledgments that she traveled through her book’s dusty settings, letting her imagination roam free while she did her research. This method shows in a story about a young woman who’s forced to come of age as the new state of Texas is being born, fought over, and settled.