This romantic story makes the reader travel through the time. It is like the classic 90's movie You've Got Mail in Victorian era.

This is a cute little story originally written in 1880 about a young woman, Nathalie Rogers, who has left home and is earning her own living as a telegraph operator (as Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter Rose did early in her life). If you think meeting a soulmate "on line" is something new, here's an over-100-year-old story to prove you wrong: one day Nattie gets a message from a fellow bored operator down the line who signs himself "C." Via telegraph messages sent when the line is empty, Nattie and "C" get to know each other, and eventually Nattie wonders if she should take the next step and actually meet her like-minded fellow operator.

Of course the course of true love never does run true and a comedy of errors follows: Nattie meets a man who claims to be "C" and is repulsed by him, Nattie's friendship with her fellow boardinghouse tenant Cynthia Archer, the shy and stammering Quimby (another fellow boarder) who has a crush on her, and two other neighbors, chubby Jo Norton and the new boarder, Clement Stanwood, and not to mention the suspicious Miss Kling who thinks Nattie will come to grief by having "a career" instead of a husband.

While it's written in the quaint language of the time, it's actually quite a familiar tale to anyone who's formed a friendship on the internet, romantic or not, proving that all things are new again.

This is the best romance book I have read in a while. It is so thoroughly fascinating that I couldn't put it down after starting. It feels very modern for a Victorian book that at first I thought it was written nowadays merely emulating the 1800's. The way the book goes on about being a woman, having ambition and facing prejudice is fascinating if we consider the date this was written. Also, going beyond the parallels to modern online dating, which are eerie, the part where the book describes a device you could keep in your pocket and use to hear your loved ones voice when you missed them seems so futuristic I actually tend to believe the author was a time traveler.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dover Publications for a digital galley of this novel.

First published in the United States in 1890 this novel suffered from an erroneous surmise on my part which just wouldn't go away. I knew there was going to be a romance involved, but I had expected the overall story would revolve more around the telegraph than the love life of the operators. The romances (for there end up being many young people who are more than willing to fall in love) were very basic entanglements with not much to show for themselves. Two of the major characters are working as telegraph operators when they begin to talk "on the wire". A little conversation begins to be a lot of conversation until it must have been taking up a goodly portion of their working day. Soon the author moves the characters away from the telegraph office and the story becomes a series of misunderstandings and unrequited love.

I wanted more, and definitely more exciting, telegraph scenes. The book I wanted is not the one I got and I'm afraid I wasn't too much impressed by this story. The craft of writing a romantic novel in this time period was interesting; sentence structure and language is much different from modern styles so those aspects kept me entertained. The romance is squeaky clean so readers don't have to worry about finding anything to be upset about along those lines.