Review: Sweet, light read
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 1, 2012
I bought this book because I was charmed by the idea of a lonely woman tucking a letter about her hopes and dreams into a tumbleweed then releasing it like a message in a bottle across the wide Texas range. Although the plot is a familiar one... handsome, grieving widowed rancher weds a plain former schoolmistress to help on the farm then falls in love with her... Vonnie Davis tells it with heart. She is a good writer and I liked the widower, Cam McBride, and his love interest, Sophie Flannigan, although I would have liked the book to take a more leisurely pace. From meeting in Deadwood, to marriage, to falling in love, to running away from the Pinkerton, everything happened in a matter of days, so it didn't seem entirely genuine that they would fall in love so quickly. The romantic encounters were well written, but again, rushed.The story elements would have benefitted from greater detail. It was like a Readers Digest version of a Texan romance novel. At less than 100 pages, it seemed condensed and it felt to me that the writer sped through it so quickly she lost the opportunity to develop her characters beyond a surface level. Some of the peripheral characters were little more than cliché cardboard cutouts, the madam-with-a-heart Dora, the stoic Indian Standing Bear, the violent Pinkerton Veers, and who else... mannish Calamity Jane.Tumbleweed Letters was sweet, light, and undemanding. If you like a quick read you can knock out in an evening, the pace of this will appeal to you, although I felt it was too short for the $2.99 price.Three and a half stars.