#TBRChallenge 2022: A Season of the Heart

The Book: A Season of the Heart by Jillian Hart, Kate Bridges and Mary Burton

The Particulars: Historical romance anthology, Harlequin Historical #771, 2005, Out of Print, Not available digitally (at one point it was though - so check your digital TBRs and/or local library).

Why Was It In Wendy's TBR?: It's a historical western anthology with a Christmas theme published by Harlequin Historical. Of course it was in my TBR.

The Review: I don't know exactly how long I've had this anthology in my TBR, but well over a decade is likely in the ballpark - and that's the problem. Because I think younger, less jaded, not beaten down to her soul by the last two years Wendy might have enjoyed this purely on a comfort read level - for a lot of the same reasons folks turn to Hallmark movies. But it's 2022 and I've lived five lifetimes in the past two years and this ended up being an anthology where none of the stories entirely worked for me.

Rocky Mountain Christmas by Jillian Hart is straight-up Rescue Fantasy. Sheriff Mac McKaslin is summoned to the train station on a snowy night where a single mother and her young daughter have been discovered stowing away on the train. The train conductor (in all his leering, "I'm sure there's some way you can settle up missy..." glory) is demanding restitution for his employer and Mac, while not wanting to throw her in jail, can't feed her to the wolves.  So he makes all the appropriate mouth noises and takes Carrie Montgomery into town, depositing her with his parents until he can figure out what to do with her.

What he does is basically try to get her out of town as fast as possible. Mac's a widower, haunted by his wife's tragic death, and Carrie makes him feel tingly in his manly bits - which is obviously like the worst thing that can happen to these sorts of romance heroes.  Her parents put her to work in their store, he secures her a train ticket to Seattle (where she was hoping to go to find work) and of course Carrie is one of those prideful Won't Take No Charity sorts of romance heroines so they butt heads.   

I mean, that's pretty much it.  Then they decide after knowing each other a few days that they're in love and the requisite marriage proposal happens.

I mean, it's fine, I guess?  But there's just not much fire here. There's not much of anything here.  Heroine in trouble, hero playing white knight, the end.  Meh.

Grade = C

The Christmas Gifts by Kate Bridges was the best story in the bunch for me, and while it didn't light my world on fire, it was better than OK. Sergeant James Fielder, a Canadian Mountie, is patrolling an isolated area on his dog sled when he finds an abandoned baby. Out in the cold.  The infant girl is cold, hungry and he's days away from civilization but he knocks himself out to get to Maggie Greerson's store in record time. Maggie is a young widow and James has mighty unrequited feelings for her.  Anyway, Maggie takes the baby in, her and James rekindle feelings they once had for each other and deal with past baggage between them.

What stood out for me in this story was what Maggie and James fight about - money.  Maggie is a widow with a successful business and sees all men as interlopers out to get their hands on her money.  James has a strained relationship with his father stemming from financial hardships the family had when he was growing up.  As sick as this sounds, I love reading a good argument in a romance story, and this was a really good argument.  This is also the story that I found was heaviest on the Christmas atmosphere, so a good candidate for a quick Christmas Eve read.

Grade = B-

Before Mary Burton took to writing suspense novels she wrote several historical westerns, and while The Christmas Charm starts out promising it ended up leaving me cranky.  It's 1869 and Colleen Garland is a young widow who has spent the past several years nursing an elderly husband from complications of a stroke. She made a lot of sacrifices so that her younger sister, Deirdre, could have the opportunities she never did, but now the bubble-headed ninny says she's quitting school and she's run off to marry a local ranch foreman!  Turns out the foreman works for Keith Garrett, the boy Colleen loved prior to the War, and who refused to marry her before he went off to fight. He's now a prosperous local rancher and naturally all butt-hurt that Colleen didn't wait for him - so there's tension there.

I cannot abide romance heroes like Keith. He's all up in his fee-fees because Colleen married "an old man" not considering for one hot damn minute that maybe she had no choice. It was either marry the old man or become a prostitute.  Her parents died, she finds out her father took out another mortgage on their land, the cattle all died during a terrible winter, the crops failed, like it all went to hell.  And there's Keith judging her after the fact. The same Keith who was all "I couldn't marry you, Virginia needed men to fight" and I'm reading this thinking child, please! F*ck Virginia!

And then of course they fall into bed together and they decide to get married and this asshat is all like "You need to give up the store."  After she worked herself to the bone to keep the store profitable after her husband's stroke?! The store that saved her from a frickin' life of poverty?!  Go f*ck yourself Keith. And then go f*ck the horse you rode in on. Seriously, this guy!

But of course they end up working it out and she pops out twin boys during a Christmas Day epilogue.  He's a jerk and she's an idiot for not shooting him in his manly pride. And on top of all this? He fought for the wrong damn side.  Seriously, I hated this guy.

Grade = D

So not a terribly successful anthology, although Bridges' story was not without some charm.  Honestly, what I'm taking away from this reading experience is the satisfaction that a long neglected print book is out of my TBR. Dare I say it? It feels like an actual sense of accomplishment.