Eliza Jane Carter is a women’s libber who has arrived at Gardiner, Texas. Eliza wants to tell the women that they need to try to obtain the right to vote, get the men in their lives to be nicer to them and hope that the sheriff in the town doesn’t shoot her from all he has heard about her from her previous visits to other towns. Adam Caldwell is the sheriff of the town and his assistant is Will Martinson; Adam asks Will to keep an eye on Eliza in hopes that the women don’t get too riled up and have the men getting into brawls attempting to run Eliza out of town. Will takes one look at Eliza and decides that it won’t be a bit of trouble to keep an eye on her. The woman is beautiful, and smart know matter how much fuss she may cause the town. Pretty soon Will has fallen hard and fast for the woman that most of the town had rather see leave, but Eliza still needs to leave Gardiner in order to keep spreading her word to the women of the world. Can Will convince her that the women of Gardiner, and he, need her more than anyone else?

Eliza is one of the few divorced women of the day; her husband divorced her when it was discovered that she could not bear children. She has a chaperone that goes with her and he provides money to her from her estate. Unfortunately the lawyer who oversaw all of her money was a gambler, and he gambled the money away. Now Eliza is stuck in Gardiner Texas because her chaperone stole the remainder of the money that they had in their possession and left town. Now Eliza has to do what a “real man” would do and earn her money so she can leave town. Life just got a whole lot harder for Mrs. Eliza Jane Carter.

Taming Eliza Jane is without a doubt the best book that I have read in a long time. The book is a romance, but it’s a whole lot more. It’s a book proclaiming to women that they don’t have to have a child one right after the other, that they need the men in their lives to appreciate what they do for them and that they have just as much say so as to what goes on in their family as the men do. From Eliza liking the women in the “chicken coop” to working in the livery stable the woman had to be admired, and the fact that Will stood by her and loved her, you had to love him. This is the first Shannon Stacey that I have read, but I intend to buy more to see if they are all as humorous and as loving as this one was. If so, I have a new author that I’ll be adding to my favorite author list.

Reviewed by: Missy