Medicine is a man's field. Women aren't allowed to attend medical school. Proper Bostonian ladies marry and become dutiful wives and mothers, not doctors. Michaela Quinn has heard it all, but medicine is her lifelong passion, and a physician is what she strives to become in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman by author Teresa Warfield.

Yup. It's a novel based on characters from one of the best historical dramas to ever grace a television screen, a superb family show from Saturday night network television in the 1990s.

Still, I didn't step into this read expecting to relive my beloved onscreen drama through it. Television is television and books are books—very different mediums for storytelling. So I let this historical fiction novel be what it is: a historical fiction novel.

It's the coming-of-age story of an imperfect, ambitious heroine who has much to learn and must fight numerous frustrations and rejections to walk in her purpose. The tale includes Michaela's vital relationship with her physician father, her difficult relationship with her conventional mother, her first romantic love, and of course, her early work on the path to becoming a doctor.

Some of the medical scenes are pretty graphic, but hey. The medical field isn't for the faint of heart.

Now, the writing style is rather trite and redundant in places, the storyline rushes at times (indeed, there are a lot of years to cover), and I'm not sure the tale really concludes so much as it just goes along and eventually stops, pretty much where the television show begins. But the novel is rich in historical background and detail, with new inventions of the time, the heated sociopolitical climate in America, the Civil War, and the shifting landscape of medicine.

In all, a worthwhile read for this fan of inspiring historical fiction. ( )