Review: Blurry moral and not my kind of HEA
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 15, 2013
I'm struggling to write a fair review on my thoughts for this book. I recently read SE Smith's Indiana Wild and absolutely loved it.  I thought it was hysterically funny and an overall smoking hot battle of the sexes book that had me hooked from beginning to end.  I searched for similar themes to see what else is out there and found this book.  The description states that it's a time traveling erotic romance with spankings and historical domestic discipline and quite frankly, I didn't really know what that would interpret to, but I gave it a try.  Most of the description is correct and is the foundation for this book, but I didn't find it particularly erotic.  The writing is decent, but the story told left me conflicted.Modern day 23 year old Janelle Prescott gets into a car accident and when she awakes she's in a jail cell in the 1800's old west.  Marshal Aaron Jackson finds himself completely smitten with the beautiful stranger and takes her into his family's home to figure out what to do with her and her predicament.  Having a difficult time adjusting to her new situation, Janelle uses disrespectful language and is highly emotional.  To me this would be quite understandable since she's been plucked not only from her time but also from her career and her parents whom she loves dearly.  Whenever Janelle forgets her place, she is punished by spanking.  As she continues to forget her place, her spankings escalate.The bottom line is that I'm not turned off that she's spanked for bad behavior, but I thought eventually it would transform into something more adult.  Children are spanked because often they don't understand the words you're trying to say or the message you're trying to convey, but when you have two grown adults, I can see it as an extreme to get someone's attention in the beginning, but for it to be her way of life just demeans the intelligence they both have.  I'm even struggling to see where the line is between "spanking" a grown woman and "hitting".  Spanking is hitting, but it's a nicer word and blurs the lines of flat out abuse.  I had expected Janelle and Aaron to eventually compromise.  Janelle certainly does time and again, but Aaron's rules were the rules and anything he deemed unacceptable was as good as law.Domestic discipline aside, this story was the categorical breakdown of a strong, independent, skilled and capable woman who is slowly turned into a submissive girl, and not submissive as in the bedroom like I expected an erotic romance to be, but submissive in life.  Even dom/sub novels have equal footing outside the bedroom.  Janelle is called a "good girl" so many times that I struggled to figure out what the message trying to be conveyed was.  It was okay for her to be a woman in bed, but in life she was a girl.  Finding her happiness was all about making her husband happy and had nothing to do with her wants.  It was really very much like a child desperate to make her father happy and keep his attention.  I thought for sure Janelle would teach them all along the way that you should aspire to do more than what society says and shoot for the stars, but that was clearly not the moral of this story.  Apparently the message here is life often sucks and you have to make the best of it.  If I wanted that, I could just watch the news.  I wouldn't be reading fictional romance novels.