Review: Not What I Expected But You Should Decide for Yourself
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2014
Although I love westerns and mail order bride books, this one was not my cup of tea. There were a couple of issues that did not sit well with me that I will describe towards the end.Ada was well educated and well rounded in the arts and music but she could shoot and ride as well as may man, maybe even better. Her virtue was intact but she had a secret. She was raised in a bordello and it had gotten more and more dangerous there. With very few choices left she chose to offer herself as a mail order bride.Patrick, her new husband, was loving but very judgmental and prejudice, especially against bordellos and women of the evening. He had zero tolerance for anyone who did not live the kind of life he saw as fitting. There is an explanation for that later in the book.I was never truly drawn into the story. Usually I get so into a story that I feel a part of it, but with this book I just felt like an outsider looking in who was having difficulty connecting to main characters. I did not feel a connection between Ada and Patrick and was never certain if it was day 2, day 40 or day 100 of their marriage. In some places the time skipped without much detail, jumping ahead but never quite revealing the passage of time. For instance, in one scene it seemed to me the story had jumped a couple of months into the marriage but the scene after that one let me know they had been married three weeks. It was confusing at best.There was one other item that was a bit troubling for me, but maybe not for others. It could be because of the way I was raised and I am conservative. There was talk of church, prayer multiple times, mentioning of God, even a sermon, (which is fine by me) but on the next page Ada would be stroking Patrick's 'member' or receiving oral sex. I read both secular and inspirational books and this is the first one that has combined both in the same book. It was just different from what I have been used to. That doesn't make it wrong but, for me, it made it a bit confusing and I was never certain what genre this really belonged to.Read it for yourself and see what you think.