In the still of a snow-covered morning in upstate New York, a girl out riding her horse is hit by a 40-ton truck. Though horribly injured both 13 year old Grace MacLean and her horse Pilgrim survive. But the impact on their lives and the lives of those who love them is devestating.

Grace is the only child of a prominent New York magazine editor, Annie Graves, and her husband Robert. In a way which none of them at first understands, their destiny comes to depend on Pilgrims. So traumatized is he that even the vet who saved his life now wishes he hadn't. Annie refuses to have him destroyed, sensing that if she does, something in Grace will die too.

She hears about a man in Montana, a "whisperer" who is said to have the gift of healing troubled horses. Abandoning her job, Annie sets off across the continent with Grace and Pilgrim to find him. The man's name is Tom Booker and he lives on the Rocky Mountains Front, a place of daunting beauty. Here, under the massive Montana sky, all their lives are changed forever.

This seems to be something of a drama by the numbers book. We have as much 'wild beauty' as possible, we have the kid in the accident, the broken horse who needs fixing, the mysterious man who can do the fixing, the successful woman who has a Career and the strangely stupid husband of same.

I'm sorry if I'm sounding negative about this book, I shouldn't be. The first half of it is very good reading, with a decent story and some good mental imagery happening. The problem lies in the second half of the book, where Evans must have worried about his page count and brought in some stock dramatic devices. We have everything here, from wild horses to broken things to betrayal. It's certainly not quiet in Montana.

On the whole I wouldn't say this was a terrible book, but it is a book full of stereotyped drama. I'd rate it as worth a read if its lying around the house, but not much more than that. I never saw the film but I bet it was better than this.