Book Review: The Texan's Reward (The Wife Lottery #4)

Overall: 2/5

Plots and Themes: 2/5

Characters: 2/5

Writing Style: 2/5

Attention Grabbing: 3/5

This book is the fourth book in The Wife Lottery series but can be read as a standalone. It follows Nell, who was a young and crazy orphan in the first book but is now a young woman who was injured saving her friends (featured in the previous novels). She sees the land she has inherited from her guardian and knows that it would be best to have someone to help her manage it all and so she puts out an advertisement for a husband.

Enter Jacob Dalton, who decides that if anyone is going to marry her to protect her it's going to be him. This just got progressively weirder and ickier as the plotline went on, but I chose to ignore the age difference for the resolution. But I was sort of expecting a resolution that cinched all the plotlines and the whole Zeb thing forever, since that's how her injury arc started out. But really, it was a weird combination of different smaller conflicts till the ultimate danger that was over as fast as it started. 

I don't like it in books when a character has something to overcome and the author sort of speeds through the entire journey to getting to the point that it's been overcome. Like, I recognize that we don't want to see someone complaining about an injury for 300 pages. But the ending was lackluster to me because it cut scene right and skipped a couple months and didn't explain it all to us. Other than that, the book was a pretty standard western romance. Definitely not my favorite or my favorite in this series, but it was okay.

Book Review: In Want of a Wife (Bitter Springs #3)

In Want of a Wife

Jo Goodman

3/5

Jane is trying to escape her past and she thinks she can do so by moving to the middle of nowhere and marrying a man she's only met through correspondence. They both have a lot of secrets that threaten them being anything more than a marriage of convenience. Trigger warning on that, there are a few pages where past sexual assault is mentioned and discussed.

It was good, I think both of the characters dealt with the situation admirably. There was a lot of drama and a lot of situations that could've ruined everything. I think it was a very run of the mill western novel, with the benefit of well-written characters where this genre sometimes suffers. I think it was a little boring at times, but the authenticity of emotion was there. 

If you like westerns but don't like how cringy they can be- especially when describing women- then this would probably be a good read for you. It has a lot of serious themes, like I said read with caution or skip it if that bothers you, but it just added to the emotional intensity of the relationship. If it weren't for the weirdness of the conflict with his brother and how forced it felt chronologically then I think I would have rated it higher.

Book Review: Without Words

 

Without Words

4/5

Ellen O'Connell

I don't think that anyone is trying to argue that western romances have good covers, but this one was so bad that I almost didn't read it. Despite the cover though, this was actually a really good book even aside from the romance. Hassie just watched her stepson murdered, or brought to justice for his theft, by a bounty hunter. Her husband had just died as well, but he had been much too old to do anything useful anyways. After some events in the town he tries to leave her in, he knows he has to take her to a safer place. 

I think what I loved about this book was that it wasn't super insta, there was a lot of time and a lot of time spent together before things really escalated at all. Also, the "insurmountable" barriers that many books of this genre try to present were minimized and dealt with in a mature fashion. They didn't have constant soliloquy's about the doomed nature of the disparity of their relationship, they just talked things out. 

And Hassie was an extremely well-written character to me. She dealt with a lot of misfortunes in life and did so without losing hope, but she also didn't make her want to accept every offer that came her way. She continued to demand what she deserved while maintaining positivity, her strength of character was in a lot less of a direct way that books with "strong heroines" can typically go for.

Would definitely recommend for everyone who is a fan of western romances but thinks they're consistently too cringy. If you want a really light feel-good kind of story this is also the perfect way to get you out of a slump.

Book Review: Mustang Wild (Wild #1)

Mustang Wild

Stacey Kayne

3/5

I swear, someone needs to take my Kindle away cause I'm down the rabbit-hole of the western romance genre and I have zero regrets. Skylar Daines has been dressing as a boy for a good portion of her life to help her father tame horses. That's pretty cool, but she's sick of all the lying and of the nomadic lifestyle they've been living and demands better. She thinks she's going to get it until her father is murdered in a mutinous scheme. To try to save some piece of that future, she seeks out her father's business partner and finds his twin brother- whom she immediately accidentally marries.

I didn't mind Tucker as a character all that much. He was okay, and I do appreciate that both the brothers came to appreciate her skills. I wish she didn't want to be a wife and mother so much, since she's such a cool and prospectively independent character. The entirety of the plot was pretty simple and straightforward aside from her skill, so you can see why I wanted more.

I like the marriage of convenience trope, this one didn't really convince me it could have been all that accidental. It went against Skylar's later established character for her to make such an impulsive and forced decision. I didn't like that part and I didn't like how long they went back and forth between hating and loving each other. That's the typical problem I have with romances in the enemies-to-lovers categories and might just be my own impatience.

If you like simple western romances, which is really all I have the mental capacity for right now, then this is a perfect read for you. There's nothing all that problematic, it's not entirely clean but it doesn't have those awkwardly intense sex scenes either. It's pretty much middle of the road on all fronts.

Book Review: Texas Rain (Whispering Mountain #1)

Texas Rain

Jodi Thomas

3/5

Rainey Adams is running from an arranged marriage, she's just trying to make ends meet and that involves stealing a horse. Unfortunately, it was in range of Travis McMurray, a Texas Ranger with a pretty strict definition of the law. She makes a clean getaway, pretty much because he lets her, but he can't stop thinking about her.

I think it was a little more authentic than the other westerns I've been reading. I like how they built their relationship through a little bit of correspondence before meeting again, that gave their relationship a little substance. It was fun to see Rainey try to balance her independence with her need for a family that actually cares about her, it would have been a very realistic worry for someone in her position.

I didn't like most of the action. I had a problem with this in the other Jodi Thomas book I read. The action is hard to follow and the first fight scene felt pretty irrelevant too. I get that it meant a lot later on, but it felt so thrown in and random at the time that it gave me whiplash. I was also waiting for Rainey's past to catch up with her, same as I was waiting in the last Foster book. It never did though, I was sure the media attention she got from the whole kidnapping would lead her father right to her or cause the rangers to realize she was wanted for robbery. The time wasn't very conducive for good communications, it just kind of irked me that there was that opportunity for drama and it was squandered.

Overall though I wasn't really all that disappointed with it. If you're looking for a western romance this one is easy to read and not super graphic- I know that's a general problem that some people can have with this genre.

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.

Book Review: The Bride Wore Spurs (Inconvenient Brides #1)

The Bride Wore Spurs

Sharon Ihle

3/5

This book had a lot of good moments, but it really barely made three stars for me. It follows Lacey, a young woman fresh to Wyoming and really fresh to the real world in general. She has spent her entire childhood in an insane asylum after the death of her parents. As such, she is still prone to spells in which she completely dissociates from the world. She wants to live though, and is hoping that getting away and getting married with her only friend as mail-order brides will solve it all. Her new husband doesn't want her at first, it was just done as an afterthought by his neighbor. Despite all of her shortcomings, he's soon convinced that it could have been a good idea.

The annoying part of it all was how much build-up there was for such little revelations. Lacey's condition is hyped up the entire novel and then at the end it's solved with a few sentences. The entire main conflict of the book is also wrapped up in a few sentences- was it that easy to get away with stuff in Wyoming? Probably, but it felt weird and rushed to me. It also kind of annoyed me how totally useless Lacey was at points. I get that she was raised in a sheltered environment, though I would have expected her to have been forced to learn more tasks at the asylum considering her relative competency. But she couldn't do literally anything at first. I don't know, it was just very annoying.

Hawke was okay but he felt a little too forceful for my taste. He said he was going to be gentle or whatever and then he was like this is my god-given right. He didn't want to get married and all of the sudden he was just all in? Again, it felt like there was a lot of waffling at first and then no bridge into the actual event, just diving straight in. I didn't hate it at all, it entertained me and I finished it very quickly, it just wasn't all that special.

Book Review: The Texan's Wager (Wife Lottery #1)

The Texan's Wager

Jodi Thomas

4/5

I haven't read a western romance in a long time but maybe I should find more cause I kind of vibed with this one. Bailee is in jail with her two friends after confessing to the murder of a man who tried to rob them and kidnap her friend. They haven't found his body but the sheriff can't just let them off without any punishment, he'd fine them but they don't have any money. So he offers a trade, if they get married and have their husband pay the fine then they're free to go rather than hanging. It was kind of a bluff because the sheriff knew no jury would ever convict them, but it worked out for the better when Bailee meets Carter.

Carter is extremely quiet, his parents were killed in front of him when he was five and that kind of trauma doesn't just go away. It also helps to understand that his mom was deaf, even before her murder they didn't really talk much vocally. It made me so sad when we learned that though, the sheriff saying that he was signing and yelling in a language that no one else could hear. Carter was super sweet too, not aggressive just very awkward. He never pushed Bailee and really all he wanted was to build a relationship based on trust.

Bailee was a strong character, she led her whole group through the desert after they were abandoned by the caravan. I wish we had gotten more on her backstory though, that was one of the problems I had with this book. They kind of said stuff and never really gave us further support on it. I guess it went along with the lack of real talking that the couple did, I mean they talked about their feelings a bit and all it wasn't super insta-love they just didn't talk about their pasts. I know they didn't want to dwell on it but like, Bailee killed a guy can we talk about that?

I would still recommend the book though! Super sweet and super fun with adventure and gunfights and everything you would expect from Texas in the 1800s. If you're afraid to read it because of misogyny I would say don't be afraid, we have strong female characters and men who know the right time to step aside.