#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.

TBR Challenge 2012: Anger Management

The Book: High Country Bride by Jillian Hart

The Particulars: Inspirational historical western romance, Love Inspired Historical, 2008, Out of Print, Available Digitally, Book two in connected duet.

Why Was It In Wendy's TBR?:  I picked this one up at RWA 2008 (uh, San Francisco?).  Plus, I tend to like Jillian Hart's books.

The Review:  Joanna Nelson's life has been one big trial after another.  After her no-good drunken husband dies, she takes her two small children to live with her father.  He's not much of a prize either, and when he takes sick, Joanna writes her half-brother begging for help.  Now their father is dead, and Joanna is hoping that Lee can hold off the banker and debt collectors with the same ease Daddy did.  She's in for a shock though when Lee declares that he had no intention of keeping the farm and has sold it back to the bank.  Oh, and by the way, she and her two kids need to get the hell out before nightfall.

Aidan McKaslin finds Joanna Nelson and her two small children living out of a wagon, and squatting on his land.  He can't very well leave them there, and the idea that this woman has, literally, no place to go and no one to help ease her burden turns his stomach.  He offers her the use of an old shanty cabin he has on his land, just for the night of course.  Until she can decide what she's going to do.

What I tend to love about Hart's historicals is that she really slathers on the angst, but still manages to make it feel authentic.  In other words, not over the top.  Yes, Joanna has had a hard life, but nothing that befalls her is so extraordinary that it couldn't have happened to women living in the 19th century.  She's been at the mercy of useless men her whole life, and while Aidan does scare her, at first, she quickly realizes that he's not just any man.  He's the man.  However, as much as she's starting to care for him, she knows that he is unable to return her feelings.  He's already buried the love of his life, along with their infant son.  While his faith is still strong, he fears his heart is dead.

The emotional turmoil in this story is really gut-wrenching.  Joanna has gumption, and is the sort of woman who would go to hell and back if it meant providing stability for her kids.  Aidan is a man who was so desperately in love with his late wife, that her death literally shattered him.  It's an amazing amount of internal baggage in this story, and the author makes her characters walk over miles of broken glass while lugging it around.

Unfortunately the longer the story goes on, that baggage gets heavier.  It also begins to wear on the reader how exorbitantly tolerant Joanna is.  Aidan isn't outright cruel.  He doesn't beat her.  He doesn't abuse her.  But his belief that he simply cannot love her and her refusal to confront him on his bullshit began to make me very angry.  Joanna feels it's her fault for making Aidan relive his pain.  Joanna thinks that if she lessens his burden, if she waits him out, if she's patient, he'll come around.  In the meantime he avoids her and avoids her children - both of whom worship him.

I wanted her angry.  I wanted her so angry that she'd damn God to hell, get in Aidan's face, and tell him what a moron he was being.  I wanted a confrontation.  Instead we get Aidan wandering off to contemplate if Joanna and the kids coming into his life were all part of "God's plan."  Ok, fine.  That might be all well and good - but would it have killed God to let Joanna find a little backbone and rip Aidan a new one in the process?

This is a hard book for me to wrap up into a final grade.  It starts off like gang-busters, and I loved the angst.  But the lack of a real confrontation at the end, plus the fact that I got a little bored with hearing how awesome of a cook Joanna was, started to wear on me.  There's also the small matter of there not being a love scene in this book.  Yes, I'm well aware this is an inspirational.  I also do not need sex scenes in my romances.  But in this one?  I do.  Why?  Because Aidan's complete unwillingness to let go of the past for pretty much the WHOLE book makes it hard for me to believe that finally, in the last chapter, he's suddenly willing too.  That after, for the WHOLE book, he's held fast with his I'll-Never-Love-Again idiocy, suddenly in the last chapter he admits his feelings and I'm supposed to believe everything will be just dandy?  A love scene, even a vaguely-drawn G-rated one, would have gone a long way in showing that Aidan is ready to move on, be the husband and father that Joanna and the kids deserve.

So yeah, I got angry.  I got angry that Joanna didn't get angry.  But, I'll be honest, this book sucked me in to the point where I read it in a day.  And considering I DNF'ed one book, and chucked aside two others, before settling on this one?  As angry as I was, we're not talking anywhere near hate.

Final Grade = C+

TBR Challenge 2011: Montana Wife

The Book: Montana Wife by Jillian Hart

The Particulars: Historical western romance, Harlequin Historical, 2004, Out of Print, Available Digitally!

Why Was It In Wendy's TBR?:  Hart is mostly known for her inspirationals these days, but I autobuy her secular work.  I picked this one up at a used bookstore many moons ago after enjoying some of her others.

Review:  Rayna Ludgrin has just buried her husband.  The love of her life, he dropped dead working in the fields, and now she's a widow with two young sons to raise.  Compounding this tragedy, her husband wasn't forthcoming with her about the state of their finances.  A widow sitting on prime land, it doesn't take long for the vultures to start circling.

Coming to her aid is one of her neighbors, Daniel Lindsey.  He genuinely wants to help her out, to repay the kindness her husband showed to him when he first moved to Montana.  Growing up knowing nothing but hardship, Daniel is a loner.  However the more time he spends around Rayna, and marvels at her determination and strength, the more he's sunk.  When more tragedy strikes, a marriage of convenience seems the only logical answer.

Hart excels at writing angst, and she lays it on pretty thick with this story.  That said, it's all (sadly) believable angst.  Everything that befalls Rayna in the first half of this story rings amazingly true.  These were hardships any newly-single woman would have faced, especially living out in the middle-flippin' nowhere, in still largely untamed country.  She marries Daniel because, well, her other choices suck.  But she also knows that Daniel is a good man.  He'll do right by her and her boys.  That said, she passionately loved her first husband.  And the guy hasn't been dead all that long.  To say she's torn about this marriage, even if it is an "arrangement," is putting it mildly.

Daniel is a fantastic hero.  One of those strong, silent types with a deeply wounded and vulnerable core.  He admires Rayna, is attracted to her, and marrying her does give him a chance at owning some prime land.  But he's also doing it for her two young sons.  So that they'll never know the hardship that he had to endure as a child.  He's a admirable man.  A good, solid man.  A man I wanted to run away with before it was all said and done.

All this being said, this story isn't perfect (and oh, how it kills me to say that!).  Namely, there are some inconsistencies.  Daniel starts out a bit wounded Alpha - one who doesn't think much of women.  Yet by the time he marries Rayna, he's gooey Beta, reminiscing about how as a child he wanted some kindly woman to adopt him and be his mother.  So which is it?  On the bright side, at least he doesn't tar and feather Rayna with the All Women Are Needy And Selfish brush.

There are also a couple of secondary characters who aren't consistently employed in this story, and sort of flit in and out when the author conveniently needs a plot device.  Namely, Rayna's youngest boy (in contrast, I adored the older boy) and the villain.  It's the villain that gives me the most pause - especially his actions at the end that come out of left field (and are never explained!) after he's largely "off page" during the entire second half.

For her part, I liked Rayna.  She's a good example of a "strong" heroine who isn't annoyingly feisty or brain-dead.  But man, while I understood that she was still mourning her Dead Hubby, she says some things to Daniel that just about ripped my heart out.  It's these emotional moments that really made this book sing for me.  I bled for both of these characters, even as I wanted to reach through the pages and smack 'em around a bit.

What I'm left with is....a book I wish I could grade higher.  I think I would have chopped back the first half of this story, and given readers more of the second half after the couple has married.  Still, I found this to be a very enjoyable read.  It's emotional, it's angst-y, and Hart does a very nice job delivering the western homesteading vibe, while not glossing over the history.

Final Grade = B