Book Review: Cherish

Cherish

Catherine Anderson

3/5

I'd say that this book was pretty good, a fast read that gave a lot of fun historic facts. After seeing both her parents and the rest of their convoy brutally murdered, Rebecca seeks solace with the cowboys who rescued her. Race has been fighting fate every day of his life, he's a quarter Apache and has used people's natural fear to his advantage. It doesn't make sense to him how Rebecca trusts him so completely, but he's determined to protect her.

I think the main problem I had with it was how sporadic the threat seemed to be. If these people were actually so good at being outlaws and murdering and robbing people, how were they so bad at stealing this money? There was at least half an hour where they had murdered everyone else besides a young woman in debilitating shock. I don't think it would take all that long to find a secret compartment in one of the wagons, yet they ran and didn't even look? Then failed in every subsequent attempt that stretched out over an entire month? It didn't speak very highly of Race's skills that he was barely able to defeat these idiots.

I don't know if the main characters clicked all that much. It felt a little sketchy, she put all her faith in him to protect her because she was all alone in an unknown area and he gave her an ultimatum. I don't know if that's a little Stockholm Syndrome-ish, she was desperate to fit in and be needed and like did what she thought she had to. In the context of her life though I guess it made more sense, she was really willing to marry whoever she was told to marry and she at least knew him.

I did appreciate that he didn't try to majorly change her. She had ditched her belief in God, understandable after everything she witnessed. But he didn't roll with that, he assisted her in adjusting to a new reality. It was weird how completely she adjusted to a life outside of a cloistered religion though, she just ditched her brainwashing completely? I don't know if I could see that happening but I do understand that it was an insane trauma. I don't understand how she maintained her weird formal speech in the epilogue, eight years after living with only illiterate cowboys. I'll just assume that she communicated enough with her religious cloister that she maintained that pattern in stressful situations.

Overall, it was good and nice with weird spacing. I liked it and think it's a decent western romance but it was probably too long for the events that actually occurred in the book.