Review: Good read. Not a favorite, but still a heart warmer.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 12, 2012
I didn't enjoy this book as much as the last one I read from this author. ("A Lantern in the Window" was terrific!) This story was emotional and sweet, but it had a few things that knocked it down a star for me.First, the author wrote the hero's daughter to be four years old, but gave her the speech of a two year old. Every "R" the child spoke was written as a"W" in the book's text. I.e. "Dress" would be "Dwess". "Great" would be Gweat". This continued through the entire book, sometimes with more than one 'W' word in a single sentence. I'm guessing the author meant for it to be adorable, but as a reader it just got annoying and distracting.Second was the speed with which the heroine decided she was going to step into the hero's three kids' lives. Within an hour of meeting them, the vegetarian heroine had changed the four year old into a vegetarian, despite the hero being a cattle rancher. She sat at their dinner table and gave a speech about how much better it is to stick with veggies and grains...  The family is a strapped for money, but now Dad has to go to the grocery store and buy tofu and soy milk because his little girl won't eat what he put on the table. The heroine didn't seem to get it.Finally, the epilogue was just too neatly packaged with a big ribbon on top. Life-long family grievances with people who are described as snobby, cold, and greedy throughout the book are suddenly patched up in the matter of a few sentences. I was wishing the author had allowed the story to retain a bit of the bitter- sweetness that keeps a story realistic.Despite all of this, I read the whole story and it was nice. Not something I would reread, but good for a rainy afternoon read.