Sophia Deveraux's life is shattered when she refuses to marry an Army officer in 1838. Her father is beaten and Major Todd has her taken from her lovely Georgia home and thrown in with the native people who are being forced off their land and penned up in Fort Wool. The Cherokees are kind to her and many of them have been educated in English, but their good land and the potential for gold have made these proud people all but invisible to the white settlers.

TRAIL OF HOPE shows the appalling conditions inside the fort where Sophia befriends a man named Martin. He keeps her informed on tribal deliberations. A younger man, Clay, is by birth a Choctaw and moves from fort to fort gathering details of the situation. His people were similarly forced off their land and thousands died as they were marched to a new territory. He and the Cherokee elders fear the result of being forced to march during winter, but the intense summer heat has kept the soldiers in the forts, where mountains of bodies are accumulating. There can be no good result. All Sophia has of her former life is a simple doll, and fear of Major Todd keeps the man's subordinates from freeing her. Clay gets beaten by soldiers and dumped with the Cherokee on their bitter trail, and Martin and Sophia care for him, as they walk to the Mississippi with ragged blankets, mealy flour and no waterskins.

Sophia is a staunch friend to those who aid her or need care, and I liked her adaptation to a life for which she had not been raised. The callous racism all around her is taken for granted, but some of the soldiers are decent sorts, especially to the white woman. I disliked the reappearance of robotic punctuation, Sophia saying "You. Will. Not. Hurt. Him," which looks bad, is not at all as people talk and draws the readers out of the story and onto the printed page. Otherwise Heidi L. Vanlandingham has done a fine job in bringing TRAIL OF HOPE to a modern audience and giving us an understated romance.

Book Summary

Abducted from her family home in Savannah, Sophia Deveraux is thrown into an army stockade with Cherokee prisoners destined for the West. Though stalked by her abductor, she is protected by three men on the long, deadly journey to Indian Territory. Despite her starved and battered body and soul, one of them steals her heart.

When Clay Jefferson lost his family, he vowed to kill whoever murdered them. Trying to help prevent the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia, he finds his heart torn in two when protecting Sophia becomes more important than his vow of vengeance.

Fate and a gypsy curse work together as Sophia is attacked again but finds an inner strength she never knew she had, and Clay is forced to make a difficult decision -- honor his vow or listen to his heart?