Review: First Book By This Author That I Could Barely Finish
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 24, 2013
Okay... I pushed my way through the preachiness in the second Dancing Moon Ranch book with Sophie's mom and I've liked all the other Dancing Moon books so far and have written reviews about how much I like them... I wish I could have with this one because I was so excited to read about Ricky and Sophie's story finally.The preaching has gotten ridiculous.Apparently anyone involved in BDSM must be mentally ill and the reason Ricky's mom left Sam was because of that and now she sleeps around a lot and of course her slutty behavior is because of the mental ill thing that goes along with BDSM.Sophie finds out that her mom slept her way to the top of the corporate ladder and she lashes out pretty extremely - not entirely surprisingly considering how much she was lectured on modesty, etc. while she was a child, her parents hiding all the reasons WHY she wasn't allowed to get any life experiences with boys and had to go to all girl schools and is basically completely unprepared for the world of dating. And instead of ANY character seeing this as reasonable, that she's doing a major rebellion, Sam starts saying that she might be mentally unstable, they're asking Ricky if he really wants to be with a woman who goes crazy when she hits a roadblock... um... SERIOUSLY? And of course Rick is apparently beyond perfection when it comes to not sleeping around, etc.Yeah. This is totally believable, not at all preach-y, and super romantic that he'd be willing to "look past" her "crazy" rebellion and "instability" and end up loving and marrying her anyway. So she has one bad night where she completely rebels and then BOOM, Rick is disgusted with her and thinks less of her and has to "get over" that. I can't even say how angry this made me.  At least the other "heroes" in this series had a little humanity, they'd been with other women, they had life experience and there were children that were causing a lot of the conflict. Rick has none of those excuses other than being a prissy jerk.Sophie even makes a fantastic point to him saying "Then according to you, because of one incident at a party, I'm suddenly relegated to unmarriageable status." Instead of realizing what a close-minded, unsympathetic, unempathetic jerk he's going, Ricky tells her that that incident was a "warning sign."  Unfortunately because the author is apparently trying to send some kind of message, Sophie eventually starts to think that her reaction was ridiculous, rather than the way her parents handled her raising since it's pretty much their fault they didn't raise her to realize that 1. boys and girls can hang out together without having sex and 2. that you can have sex before marriage and still be a "decent" person. Which is why she thought Justine was no longer decent when Sophie realized that she'd had pre-marital sex. But that wouldn't get across the message that the author apparently wants to preach.Is Sophie being selfish? Does she need to apologize to Justine? Yes. Absolutely. But her reaction isn't over the top and it sure as heck isn't a "warning sign." Ugh. Also... it would have been nice if her parents had apologized to her too. Since they pretty much messed her up in the head. But of course they didn't because again... wouldn't go with the "message."But if you're a guy, don't worry. Apparently men can have sex, although Rick says it wasn't "recreational," it was just satisfying a mutual need. I have a heads up for the author - that makes it recreational whether you're a man or a woman and Rick comes across as a major hypocrite. And when he does finally get it on with Sophie, he tells her it's just sex and just a physical need and it's a wonder that she doesn't end up feeling like a tramp for the way that he treats her. But no, she just feels sad and rejected.Now... other than all of that, the writing is well-done as usual, I'm happy that Sophie and Rick get a HEA, and the best part of the book was Marc finally finding out the truth.  As always, Ms. Watters does a fine job when handling the tough emotional stuff. Which is why it's so distressing when she crams in the unnecessary judgmental drama to get some "message" across, because it's trite and takes away from the really good stuff that's going on otherwise. The only reason I managed to even make it through this book was because I was hoping that eventually Rick would come around and realize how ridiculous he'd acted, apologize, make everyone else realize how ridiculous and judgmental they were being... yeah it never happened. Instead Sophie realized how close she'd become to being a "bad woman" and let hypoc-Rick make her feel ashamed that she fell off the wagon one night and had her major rebellion.  Personally I thought she pulled herself together really well afterwards until the shaming started.I'm going to try one more of these books because other than Justine's and Sophie's story I want to know what happens with the kids, especially Marc. I just really hope the preaching is done because it completely takes away from the enjoyability of the story.