Reviewed by Stephanie Dagg for Readers' Favorite

"The Rocky Mountain Heiress Collection" by Kathleen Y’Barbo consists of three lively and enthralling stories: 'The Confidential Life of Eugenia Cooper', 'Anna Finch and the Hired Gun', and 'The Inconvenient Marriage of Charlotte Beck'. Each story is a romance set in the Wild West in the late nineteenth century with a very strong and self-willed heroine. Fortunately there are men around up to the task of handling them, and that takes some doing. Eugenia comes from a wealthy family with a respectable prospective fiancé all lined up. However, inspired by Mae Winslow’s dime novels, she takes herself on an adventure in the mountains and discovers she is a pretty good governess to the totally wild Charlotte Beck, who is the main subject of the third story in the collection. Anna Finch is a friend of Eugenia and, it turns out, a major inspiration to her too. These three stories weave themselves tightly together, which is a wonderful touch. Each one is peopled by interesting characters in beautifully depicted settings with attention to historical detail. Each of the stories works well on its own, but this symbiosis makes them complete.

Of course, such go-getter girls, who are prepared to stand up against their slightly domineering fathers, need appropriate men to match and merit them. And Daniel Beck, Jeb Sanders and Alexander Hambly appear to be the ones up for the job. But like the mountains in the setting of these stories, our three heroines drag them along a rocky road, which may be just too much for them to cope with. Eugenia has the nerve to discipline Daniel’s beloved daughter and Anna puts a bullet in Jeb and, as the title suggests, Charlotte’s marriage is inconvenient. Are there better men lurking in the wings? There are other unifying minor characters throughout the stories and a few well-known names of the period appear too. This collection of stories is fun, frantic in places, but ultimately heart-warming and inspiring. It is good to dream and aim to achieve as much as you can, whatever barriers you may come up against. Gender, class and convention threaten to restrict what our three girls get up to but they think otherwise. And if they can succeed, then, even though we are not characters in works of fiction, we can too.