Rio Grande Wedding by Ruth Wind

This is another Harlequin I grabbed during the BooksOnBoard Black Friday sale. I saw the words “Green card groom,” and immediately downloaded the sample. Marriages of convenience are one of my very favorite romance tropes, so I was an easy sell.

Widowed nurse Molly Sheffield finds a wounded migrant worker on her property and takes it upon herself to nurse him back to health after he begs her not to call an ambulance. Undocumented immigrant Alejandro Sosa hates to burden the strange woman who’s rescued him, but he can’t risk deportation – not while his eight year old niece is stranded alone in the wilderness after an immigration raid. Struck by Alejandro’s devotion to his niece, or perhaps due to four lonely years alone on her secluded New Mexico farm, Molly decides to do everything she can to keep him together with his niece in America, even if her deputy sheriff brother suspects they’re marrying only to secure a green card.

I really enjoyed this modern take on a marriage of convenience. Wind – who also writes as Barbara Samuel – treats the heady subject with a lot of sensitivity and avoids any grandstanding. Molly’s brother is the story’s antagonist, but he remains sympathetic or at least relatable even with his zero tolerance approach to illegal immigration. Alejandro isn’t some Woobie forced into the role of victim, he’s got some misgivings and doubts over whether he’s making the right decision to work as a migrant laborer in the US. I liked all the characters more for having some flaws.

Where the book wasn’t perfect was in the timing. Everything in the book takes place over a very short period of time. I can buy a week-long whirlwind romance ok, but resolving immigration status, family drama, a gunshot wound *and* tuberculosis as well within a week is a bit much. I really enjoyed the hero and heroine, but I had to put my “this is fantasy” glasses on to digest the neat and tidy ending. B-

~65,000 words
Published October 1st 1999 by Silhouette Intimate Moments

In His Eyes by Emmie Dark

Fans of angst and second chances would like this book. The heroine returns to her hometown after leaving ten years ago as a troubled teenager. Intending only to stay long enough to bury her grandfather, bottle his wine and sell his estate off, her plans hit a snag of sorts in the shape of the estate’s neighbor. The hero wants to add her grandfather’s vineyard to his estate’s holdings, but with their messy shared history, secrets come out and what once seemed so straightforward turns out to be anything but.

Lots of emotion in this one. The secrets behind Zoe’s banishment as a teenager are a big ones, with shockwaves that leave cracks in both of their adult lives. Their revelation forces them to reexamine assumptions they’d labored under for ten years and unleashes all sorts of feelings they don’t really want to deal with right now. Upstanding, responsible Hugh just wants to buy her family’s vineyard and get back to his role as CEO of his family’s winemaking business. Restless, rebellious Zoe wants to wrap up their business then get back to California, and away from the bad memories. Walking down memory lane is hugely uncomfortable for them, but they just can’t seem to stop the momentum and go back to how they were before the secrets came out.

I thought Dark did a good job pacing the characters through their journey of rediscovery. She dispenses bits of intrigue and backstory gradually throughout the story, neither character ever launches into a monologue of angst nor are the salient details dangled just out of the reader’s grasp over and over. I felt that the characters discussed and processed their feelings in ways that were unique to their personalities – Zoe giving up information and emotion only under duress, and Hugh relentlessly pursuing further discussion to try to make things right. It’s a dynamic that not only suits the storytelling, it shows me a couple well-matched for an HEA. Their communication styles complement each other perfectly.

The dialog felt a little forced at times, especially when Mr. Plot Expediter Morris is on screen, and I didn’t love how the conflict was finally resolved. I wanted more initiative from Zoe after she flew back to California. That Hugh instead flew to her to make a declaration felt more like the author indulging her own love of the Grand Gesture than the natural outcome for the characters. It was heavy on the style and short on substance. It’s also SOP for the genre.

I picked this up on a whim during an ebook sale, and I’m glad I did. This new-to-me author is now on my list of Harlequin authors to keep an eye on. B-

~75,000 words
Published August 1st 2012 by Harlequin Superromance

Lightning Round: October 2012

Chasing Rainbows
by Victoria Lynne

I am a sucker for road romances, foul-mouthed gunslinger heroines, gambler heroes and anything set in the old west, so this scratched all my itches. It also had some fabulous, slow-burning sexual tension that more recent books just don’t seem to have the patience for anymore.

I just found the heroine almost Mary Sue-ish. She spends the bulk of the book being acted upon rather than driving her share of the action, then seems to be rewarded in the end for being such a good person before. For a heroine who was supposed to be a rough-and-tumble outlaw, she constantly needed the hero to bail her out after  she charged into things half-cocked.

I had a lot fun reading it, but it wasn’t the best book it could’ve been. C+ 

+++

Never Stay Past Midnight
by Mira Lyn Kelly

This author’s books are consistently enjoyable for me (Wild Fling or a Wedding Ring? even got a rare 5* review from me on Goodreads) so just seeing that she has a new book out is enough to get me to buy without so much as a glance at the blurb or the reviews.

Never Stay Past Midnight had all the elements I love this author for. The heroine’s a grown-up with an adult’s life, libido and responsibilities. The hero’s wealthy and successful, but human. Both are reluctant to commit to a relationship, but neither’s reluctance stems from blanket judgments of the other’s gender, or any high-angst disavowals of the existence of love. They just got unresolved baggage from lives that didn’t come with training wheels.

Unfortunately, the strength of that conflict and the depth of their feelings on commitment made the rushed ending unsatisfying. While their fling that became more was charming and believable, the hero’s abrupt about-face on a serious bone of contention weakened the story. B+

+++

Texas Destiny
by Lorraine Heath

The heroine heads west to Texas as a mail-order bride after the Civil War destroys her home and family in Georgia. She expects to be met at the train station by her fiance, but is instead met by his younger brother. After falling from a horse and breaking his leg, her fiance couldn’t make the three-week trek each way himself. Hijnks ensue.

Starts slow with a metric fuck ton of angst over the hero’s scars, goes nuts with adjectives and flowery metaphors, but nails yearning and sexual tension like a boss. The end waffled more than an IHOP, but I was invested like whoa. B-

+++

The Marshal And Mrs. O’Malley
by Julianne MacLean

While I enjoyed the main couple and their romance immensely – there are real obstacles to their getting together and the yearning was palpable – the suspense plot lacked, well, suspense, and the heroine’s son was the most convenient plot moppet of all time. OF ALL TIME.

Highly entertaining, but uneven and unmemorable. C

 

 

+++

Katrakis’s Sweet Prize
by Caitlin Crews

All of the standard Presents tropes that I usually enjoy – revenge, self-made men, yachting on the Mediterranean, shitbag family drama – were accounted for in this book, but it very much did not work for me at all.

It wasn’t so silly that I stopped reading it, but pretty damn close. It was the way they treated the whole “mistress” thing, like it was a job position. It was really absurd. She not only walks up to him and says, “I had heard you were between mistresses at present. I had so hoped to be the next.” There was also this bizarre exchange:

“While I appreciate your list of rules and regulations, and will make every effort to follow them, being a mistress is much more than the ability to follow orders.” She traced the strong line of his jaw, the proud jut of his chin, with a lazy fingertip—though she felt as far from lazy as it was possible to feel. She kept on. “A good mistress must anticipate her partner’s needs. She must adapt to his moods, and follow his lead. It is like a complicated dance, is it not?”

Is this a Presents, or D/s erotica? As I told Liz, in a contemporary setting, “mistress” should be used like “pooch,” that is, only in tabloid headlines. D

+++

Easy
by Tammara Webber

Anyone who wanted to like Beautiful Disaster but just couldn’t hang with the deeply internalized misogyny and textbook abuser archetype hero need to read this book. Everyone else needs to read this book too, but those readers especially deserve to treat themselves. It’s well written and populated with fully-developed characters. A strong theme of respect and empowerment for women runs throughout without ever getting preachy (oh, well, never bad preachy, anyway.) The heroine is self-saving and the hero is just a beautiful person. A-