As a new century turns bringing brighter hope, fantastic wonders, and new developments, Joan Mason finds herself still living in the past. Orphaned at a young age and soon to turn eighteen she must find a way to make a living but hopes for a new life, even in the brave new world of the burgeoning twentieth-century she finds herself with little recourse but to reply to the dwindling call for a mail-order bride. With new fears rising at every turn she sets off to what will most surely be a life of drudgery and despair. Big, awkward and kind, Eric Ballard wishes for a chance to meet that special someone to build a life with. After watching his parents, aunts and uncles each find love his heart is full of dreams for that perfect relationship but as he shoulders more and more of the burden of working the fields at the Broken J Ranch, he has little time to entertain the notion of courting. Confiding only in his mother, he writes to a mail order bride agency trusting that his dreams will come true. Can two people coming from vastly different upbringings find love amidst the love, laughter, and even loss of a family that has grown to overflowing even the great Wyoming prairie, or will they simply live as strangers in a house that can never be a home?