Romance readers have always loved a good western. Montana Glory is the literary equivalent of an airbrushed photograph of the ranch where this story is set; it’s more fantasy than reality, and the flaws have mostly been photoshopped away.

Riley Mason is hiding from someone — but it isn’t whom you might expect. There’s no abusive ex, but someone is after her. So she takes her four-year-old daughter from Philadelphia to Montana, and gets a temporary accounting job at an isolated ranch. All she cares about is protecting her daughter, but as she gets to know the McCord family –especially the last unmarried cousin, Zane — she begins to want more for the two of them than a life in hiding.

Zane is the wild one, who had been taken away from the ranch by his parents as a child and grew up in LA. Now he’s back, though, to help his cousins search for the long-lost McCord gold, and intrigued by Riley. He can tell she’s hiding something, but he can’t tell what. As he gets to know her and her daughter, some secrets begin to come out about her past and it’s up to him and his family to protect them.

This is one of those stories that is nice but totally unrealistic. It’s so idyllic it’s practically fantasy, from the treasure hunt to the close-knit and easy family life. First of all, Riley’s daughter Summer is probably the only perfect child in the world. She’s cute, sure, but never complains, never throws a tantrum, and always behaves. How many four-year-olds does that sound like? She has some real scene-stealing moments, but is too cute and perfect, and everyone in this family seems far too adept at dealing with — and indulging — small children, considering there are no others on the ranch and most of these people are cowboys (the elementary school teacher wife of one of Zane’s cousins excluded).

The family dinners, complete with a well loved cook who makes delicious beef stews and home made bread, then brings a cart of tea and coffee and cookies into the living room for the family to have dessert in front of the fire, are again really nice but totally conflict-free and glossy. And these people are also fully capable of dealing with Riley’s pursuers. Now, this isn’t a bad thing in moderation– but just everything about this ranch seemed utterly perfect. Not at all believable.

Zane and Riley, though, had a strong connection and I enjoyed reading about them. They had great chemistry and were wonderful together, and he was great with Summer. The three of them were a cute subset of the family, one that I found much more palatable than the sprawling McCord clan as a whole. The secret Riley is keeping is an interesting one, and not something I expected. One of my only quibbles about this story, besides the one already mentioned, is that the writing and dialogue can be stiff and unnatural.

This book may have caused my eyes to roll on a fairly regular basis, but in the end it was a book I found myself thinking about when I wasn’t reading, and one with characters I enjoyed and respected.