The American West was a rough and tumble place where children on farms grew up fast, accepting huge responsibilities often before they were physically or emotionally ready to do so. While they might complain like many young people do, they worked hard because they had to.

The Matthew of the title is a twenty-five-year-old who comes across as a fifteen-year-old. Lang writes, “At twenty-five, he was too young to be responsible for his entire family and their ranch, but he accepted the role.” Considering how many men are husbands and fathers at that age, why is Matthew considered too young?

He’s the oldest of the surviving Graham kids in 1836 eastern Texas. The Graham parents were mysteriously slain and their younger brother stolen while the other seven siblings were away from the Circle Eight ranch.

Three months after the murder and kidnapping, the seven remaining children led by Matthew can’t quite make ends meet even with the help of two ranch hands and a housekeeper. What they need, they decide, is to claim their father’s land grant claim and add another four thousand acres to their six hundred acre ranch. What? Wait, wasn’t I just told they couldn’t keep up what they already had?

So Matthew and a few of the older children ride to Houston, only to find they can’t sign for the land unless Matthew is married. In a panic, Matthew says he’s wed to a girl named Hannah. Leaving the land grant office, he knows all he has to do now is find a girl named Hannah and marry her. This is fiction, so I knew a Hannah would pop up right away.

In fact, Hannah Foley and her grandmother just happen to run a boarding house in the closest town to the Circle Eight. Surprisingly Matthew hasn’t met this young woman before, but does when they bump into each other at the mercantile.

Matthew asks the spinster, plain but not too plain Hannah, to marry him so that he can claim the land since he’s lied to get it. Surprisingly, she agrees since no one else has ever courted her and is not fazed that she’s marrying a liar. They wed. Hannah and her Granny move to the Circle Eight where some of the Grahams like them and some don’t.

Matthew and Hannah go back to the land grant office and sign the papers for the land. When they return, however, they find that a neighbor’s ranch is between them and their new four thousand acres. And the neighbor is not someone who likes Matthew.

By this time in the book, the plot holes have come so fast and furiously that a halfway decent farmer could have planted a nice crop in them. But I kept reading because I can’t imagine what new potholes lurk.

Suffice it to say that Matthew’s transformation from lunkhead to husband is painful, while the shy spinster Hannah mans up almost overnight, Granny gives her homespun advice, and the mystery of the killings is solved.

While Lang’s prose is easy to read, her plotting and characterization leave a lot to be desired. Readers who want Western fairytales might enjoy this book, but those who want believable tales of the Old West would be better served to look elsewhere.