Review: A good idea gone awry
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 08 31, 2013
I LOVE books about mail order brides and I love books set back in the "good old days" of the late 1800's.  Also, I love it when the hero is a widower who is also a father so his new bride will immediately have a child to love.  I saw that this book is about a woman who goes out west as a mail order bride to a man whose first wife has died leaving him with an infant son so I was happy to purchase it and I couldn't wait to start reading.  What a total letdown!I thought the writing was extremely juvenile with short, choppy sentences and sentences that were very awkwardly worded and sometimes didn't make a lot of sense.  The conversations between the characters were worse than juvenile. In one of Thomas' letters to Anna he says, "There is no need to come worried of shelter nor food."  Were these people American?????  It doesn't say that any of them were recent immigrants. When Anna first gets out west she doesn't immediately see Thomas at the train station and she is worried that perhaps he won't show up.  Or as the book says, "The thoughts poured into Anna's frail mind."  (?????)Also, many of the events which transpired were extremely improbable.  Before she makes arrangements to become a mail order bride, it seemed like Anna's primary concern, and the focus of a lot of her attention, centered around the tears in her father's pants.  She kept sewing his pants back up but why did he keep tearing them?  She met a man named Henry and he was escorting her to meet his sister who was the person who handled the letters to and from the mail order brides and while they were walking down the street he asked Anna to "serenade" him as they walked by whistling...which she did.  (????)On Anna's first night in Thomas' home, they are not yet married, but she very casually goes in the bedroom with him and crawls into bed with him.  WHAT?????  In the late 1800's???? And after they are married, the "love" scenes between the two of them completely baffled me.  They could not have been more clinical and ho-hum.  In fact, they seemed to have all the romance and charm of a good gynecological exam.Perhaps the most improbable thing to my mind was when Josephine, who was a single lady and had never had a child was acting as wet nurse for Thomas' son, little Thomas, Jr.  (????)  Also, she is not related to Thomas but at one point she is nursing the baby out in the living room and has her breast exposed and Thomas is standing there carrying on a conversation with her and watching her.  I DON'T THINK SO!  The book did not say exactly when this story supposedly took place but it did mention that their means of transportation was horse and carriage so it must have been the latter part of the 19th Century.  There is no way a woman in that time period would have bared her breast to nurse a baby in front of a man who was not her husband and who was not even related to her.  I will believe that when I see elephants roosting in pear trees!One thing that I did enjoy in this book was that Anna had been married to William, her first husband, for one year and because she was not yet pregnant, his assumption was that she could not become pregnant.  He wanted a wife who could give him children so he divorced her.  Shortly after her marriage to Thomas she became pregnant and I was hoping that somehow word would get back to William that perhaps he was the one with the fertility problem instead of Anna.Obviously, I did not care for this book at all and I really can't recommend that anyone purchase it.