Have you ever heard someone tell a story and emphasize the wrong part of it, dwelling on some mundane detail but ignoring the really good stuff? At times, Color of the Wind is like that. The characters are promising, and there are some interesting interactions between them. But there is some really good stuff lurking in the background, and it’s hardly mentioned.

To honor her sister Ariel’s deathbed request, Ardith Merritt travels to Wyoming with Ariel’s three children. She plans to deposit the children on their father’s doorstep, and take the next train back to Boston. Ardith isn’t without compassion for the kids, but their father is Baird Northcross – her former fiance. He eloped with Ariel the night before he was to marry Ardith, and Ardith in turn fled England in disgrace. Ardith has since become a successful author of children’s books in Boston. While Ardith forgave her sister in time, she still hasn’t forgiven Baird.

But when Ardith arrives at the ranch Baird is running, it’s clear that he really isn’t ready to be responsible for the children yet. Before he came to Wyoming, he spent years exploring with the Royal Geographic Society, returning home to England only long enough to father three children. He hardly knows them, and his oldest son Durban is openly hostile to him. Ardith’s stay in Wyoming gradually becomes longer, and she soon feels like part of a family. But there are problems all around. Ardith’s publisher back in Boston suddenly wants a relationship with her, which is what she thought she wanted for a long time. And someone is stealing the ranch’s cattle, which means Baird may not meet his quota for the investors in England. Baird has a lot of guilt from his past, and blames himself for the deaths of Ariel and his cousin Bram (who explored with him). Baird and Ardith are beginning to really care about each other, but with all these obstacles to their happiness a love between them seems almost impossible. Can Ardith forgive Baird, and can Baird forgive himself?

There are a lot of things going on in this book. While Baird is working through his feelings for Ardith, he is also trying to salvage his relationship with the children he more or less abandoned. The ranch is full of other secondary characters, and Baird also has a hostile cousin who manages a neighboring ranch. The main characters from an earlier Grayson book, So Wide the Sky, also pay a visit. While all of these characters are pretty interesting, they also provide a very crowded stage for the main characters. Ardith and Baird each grow separately, but they don’t really seem to act like a couple in love until the end. With all the kids and ranch hands around, there are too many other demands on their attention.

At the beginning of the book, I wasn’t sure I was going to like Baird at all. After all, this was a hero who jilted the heroine at the alter and spent years ignoring his children. I did feel that Baird redeemed himself. The problem was that the most interesting aspects of Baird’s character went unexplored. The first was his work for the Royal Geographic Society. Baird’s children were named China, Durban, and Khyber (as in Khyber Pass) because that’s where he was when they were born. But the reader was never told what drove Baird to explore in the past, though the reason he stopped exploring is explained. Baird also suffered from dyscalculia; even the most simple math problems were almost impossible for him. But his learning disability was barely mentioned, even though at that time he would surely have been misunderstood as stupid because of it. I would have liked to hear much more about how this problem affected him.

Ardith was the more fully-realized character. She grew throughout the book in a believable way. As she struggled to forgive Baird, she fell in love with his children and the west. It would have been easy to portray Ardith as a doormat, but Grayson managed to give her character strength and dignity. Ardith also progressed as an artist. In Boston her used her artistic talent only for illustrating her books, but the wide open Wyoming landscape and the faces of western people inspired her to try new mediums and techniques.

Most of the plot is fairly engaging; its problems all center around the villain, who is completely obvious. The ranch is losing a lot of cattle, and there is only one possible character who really wants to see the ranch fail. Yet it takes Baird forever even to acknowledge that the cattle are being stolen, even though all evidence points in that direction.

In the end, this one is a mixed bag. It has a lot of potential, some of which is realized in Ardith’s character. Still, I can’t help thinking about all that interesting stuff the reader never gets to see.