Sixteen-year-old Jess, shipped to Australia to keep her safe during the war, then orphaned and left feeling abandoned, even by God, applies for the teacher’s position at Bonamarra Station. Thinking her to be a young man, Web hires her. Her cropped hair and borrowed man’s clothing protect her disguise until Web’s young son reports the bumps he saw on her chest.

The presence of a young unmarried woman in his home is a temptation he struggles to resist. He still bears the guilt of losing his equally young wife in childbirth. He ships Jess out as soon as he can, only to discover something changes everything.

Set in post-war Australia, the reader will enter the realistically harsh world of a lonely station where the lives of the few people who live there are centered around the sheep they raise. The characters are well worth knowing, and their realistic dialog (complete with a glossary at the end) is colorful. But this reviewer found the frequent use of ungrammatical sentence structure in the narration detracted from a story.