Wild Montana Skies is a great title for the first book in Susan May Warren’s Montana Rescue series.  The story does indeed take place primarily in Montana and it does include a few rescues in the vicinity of Glacier National Park, but that is not really the main focus of the story.  Readers expecting stories of daring rescues and exciting adventures by the search and rescue team will be disappointed.

This book does a lot of jumping back and forth between the potential romance stories of two female characters who work for search and rescue.  This going back and forth does not really fit.  It feels as though readers are just getting to know and care about one person and suddenly the author is following another character’s life.  Not sure how it might have worked out having two different books, but the parallel stories seem worthy of their own novels.

Warren covers many heavy and deep topics in this book and laces it with religious philosophies.  As a whole, it is a decent story in which there are many options for subsequent stories.  There are some tense moments and in retrospect, the plot seems to span many years rather than just a few short weeks.

Review of an Advance Reading Copy

This book was sent to Compass Book Ratings for review by Revell

Content Analysis:

Profanity/Language:  None 

Violence/Gore:  A scuffle in a bar results in a person being punched in the face; report that a character was involved in a fight; a character suffers flashbacks from a battle in which there was hand to hand combat and a person is fatally shot, blood is mentioned; report that a person’s mother killed her father. 

Sex/Nudity:  Recollection of a 17-year-old girl who was pregnant and unmarried, there is an implication of sexual activity which lead to the pregnancy; character admires a shirtless male; non-married characters kiss passionately including caressing of arms and face; character calls a person’s voice sexy.

Mature Subject Matter:

Posttraumatic stress disorder, adoption, teen pregnancy, war.

Alcohol / Drug Use:

Beer consumed in a bar; report that a person was drunk.