Love and adventure don’t mix, or so thinks Eleanor Morgan, a teacher of poetry in 1918 Oklahoma. And she’s heard the call to adventure all her life: through books, through histories and fairy stories, entering their worlds and their fancies. This kind of imaginative escape has given her life some of its most bright and shining days. And now, as a grown woman, she’s desirous of early twentieth-century life’s real adventures: seeing the West, joining the Navy, exploring the North Pole—and a future with no thought of romance.

But sparks fly, quite literally, on the night she meets Erwin Phipps, a chemist-turned-lieutenant, on his way home to Austin after the Armistice. Their chance encounter is brief but electric, one she’s not able to forget, as much as she tries.

Then, over a year later and with a continent now between them, an errant Valentine’s Day greeting from Erwin arrives. The embers in her heart are fanned back to life, her dreams of adventure having thus far gone unfulfilled, eclipsed by the demands of her family and profession. But letting her guard down, revealing her true self, and confronting her rejection of love may prove to be the most perilous—or gorgeous—adventure of all.