The Cowboy Takes A Bride, by Lori Wilde - Review

Cover Blurb:

Welcome to Jubilee, Texas: where everyone knows everybody’s business—especially if that business is love! Ex-champion bull rider turned cutting horse cowboy Joe Daniels isn’t quite sure how he ended up sleeping in a horse trough wearing nothing but this Stetson and cowboy boots. But now he’s wide-awake and a citified woman is glaring down at him. His goal? Get rid of her ASAP. The obstacle? Fighting the attraction he feels towards the blond-haired filly with the big, vulnerable eyes.

When out-of-work wedding planning Mariah Callahan learns that her estranged father has left her a rundown ranch in Jubilee, she has no choice but to accept it. Her goal? Redeem her career by planning local weddings. The obstacle? One emotionally wounded, hard-living cowboy who stirs her guilt, her heartstrings, and her long-buried cowgirl roots…

This is one of the books I got in my awesome goodie box from Avon.  I have to admit, this isn't one I would have been likely to pick up otherwise.  Despite encouragement from the blogosphere, I am merely neutral on cowboys.  Meh, even.  Mind you, I'm not opposed, exactly.  It's just that they don't do anything for me as a archetype.  Dukes, moguls and vampires are more my thing, I guess.  Also, just everyday guys like Nora Roberts does so well.  But country boys aren't really my kind of guys.

The other thing that turned me off about this cover blurb was one single word.  Can you guess what it is?  "the blond-haired filly with the big, vulnerable eyes."  Filly?  ICK. 

So, this book wasn't on the top of my list, but I decided to give it a shot and I'm glad I did.  I'll confess that Joe rubbed me the wrong way for awhile at the beginning, with a bit more of the swaggering good ol' boy than I love, and the bar fight scene that got the heroine all hot would have completely appalled me.

But to be fair, Joe never applied the word "filly" to Mariah, so I'll chalk that up to the blurb writer.  And this cowboy, with his swagger and belt buckle and bar-fighting black eye DOES appeal to the heroine, Mariah, and that's enough to make it a good romance in my book.  There's great chemistry between the two; and character arcs for these two are very nicely done. I think the best part of this story is the way the couple truly gets to know each other over time.  They start out with preconceived notions and assumptions that are gradually corrected without artificial-feeling major turn-arounds -- they are more like gentle, gradual course corrections.  I don't see that done very often in the typical page count book these days.  I also really liked the secondary romance between Ila and Cordy who had some really wrenching scenes.

The bantery Moonlighting*-style dialog between the two has some great moments but occasionally drags on too long for my taste.  I got the feeling the author was doing this intentionally for effect, so maybe it works for others.  It's both a plus and minus in my book.  Another thing that tweaked me was that it seemed like Joe was too frequently comparing Mariah to his deceased wife.  I can handle guilt pangs after the fact, but he shouldn't be going down a checklist in the middle of a kiss, during the actual moment with Mariah. 

On the all-the-way plus side, Wilde spins out some world-class sexual tension in this story, holding out til almost the bitter end.  For that, I will forgive her use of the term "love muscle" in the epilogue.

Bottom Line:
A cute city mouse/country mouse story with a hot cowboy and equal measures of "getting over the angst of the past."


Around the Blogosphere
Kathy at Book Reviews and More 
Lou at The Book Pushers
Mona Leigh at Paperback Dolls
Jo at My House of Books
Kathy at Inside of a Dog
Lisarenee at Seduced By Books

Sampling of Moonlighting dialog for you youngsters (look at those shoulder pads!  and the YOUNG Bruce Willis!):

How Miss Rutherford Got Her Groove Back, by Sophie Barnes - Review

Flip-Flopper
I can't make up my mind about the clever takes on movie titles for books.  I kind of love them on Kim Harrison's whole Clint Eastwood riff.  But there are so many now, as a general rule they just seem kind of lazy.  Somehow though, this one really made me smile and caught my attention.  Stylistic contrast, I guess.

I'd heard some buzz, so this title was on my mind a little bit even before I got my goodie box from the Avon Addicts program, and there it was just waiting for me.  So I was looking forward to sampling this new-to-me author.  I believe How Miss Rutherford Got Her Groove Back is Barnes' debut romance.

Austenish
I'm not going to debate whether Pride and Prejudice is the greatest romance of all time.  I can't, really, because I couldn't get through it.  I tried.  I've owned the book for years and years.  I just... can't get through it.

Many comparisons are being drawn around the web between Sophie Barnes and Jane Austen, and I have to agree.  Unfortunately for me, it's just a style that doesn't appeal to me.  On top of that, I found some of the word choices to be jarring for the style and period (makeup instead of paint or rouge, and awkard phrases like "so help him God") and it quickly added up to a book that wasn't working for me.

So at least I'm consistent.  I really wanted to like Miss Rutherford, but it just isn't for me.  On the other hand, if you enjoy Austen's style, you may find it exactly to your taste.

Around the Blogosphere
Fellow Addict Amy Valenti at Unwrapping Romance
Fellow Addict Savannah at Simply Me
Paperback Dolls
Reading Romances
The Season Blog

As always, if you have reviewed this book and would like to be linked, just leave me the URL in comments or by email, and I will edit it in.

I'm at Literary Escapism Today...

I just love Jackie.  She is so great at the whole SuperBlog thing.

Check out Literary Escapism today.

Ready for Prime Time?

Protesting Too Much
Whether here on Alpha Heroes, or elsewhere in comments, I've said on more than one occasion that I am not an aspiring writer and that my angle here is purely as a reader. 

 But, you know, things change.  People change.  I think maybe I've changed my mind about that.  I'll still be here, reading everything I can get my hands on and sharing my thoughts with the intertubes (because everyone wants to know what I think, right? Right!).  But also, I think I'd like to take a shot at the other side of the review desk. 

See, I Have This Idea for a Book
... that I've been scribbling on for a while now and I feel like maybe it's ready for a tiny bit of sunlight; and-- I hope-- for some feedback from my favorite readers.

I haven't decided whether it will be post-apocalyptic or near-future-alternate-history, because there are elements of both that I find really appealing.  Either way, it will be somewhat dystopian, but with hope (because with romance, there's always hope!)

The heroine is shockingly sheltered, by our standards and by those of the fictional world.  Basically, she's been raised in a bubble. The world she knows will shatter, along with her virginity, and as she adjusts to the "real" world around her, warts and all, her parallel journey will be to accept her own flaws which in turn will enable her HEA.

By contrast, the hero is scrappy and scarred, inside and out.  He's grown up on the streets, and has never known the comfort of having anyone shelter him from anything. He finds the soft, naive nature of the heroine insistently attractive, but at the same time, he feels horribly unworthy and fears that he can only corrupt her purity.

I'm leaning toward making it a road romance, as a metaphor for the journey(s) they will both undertake, and also, those are just fun.  I'd like to include some allusion to McCarthy's  The Road, an homage if you will, but not in a derivative way, and, you know, happier. 

The Excerpt

Bianca woke slowly, muddled, to a maelstrom of confusion: heat and weight that should have been suffocating but instead something in her craved more.  She tried to turn her head but it wasn't allowed.  She tried to scream but the tongue in her mouth--someone else's--made that impossible.  Her eyes flew open, their usual clear blue clouded with perturbation, and locked into another pair, the color of ice and steel and things that were sharp and dangerous.

For a moment she was distracted by this. The only eyes she'd ever seen were the same color as hers-- her mother's. Close-ups in the old movies her mother had on VHS had shown eyes of other colors, but she hadn't really believed them. Her mother had told her that people back then often wore contacts to make their eyes different colors, and she wondered if the man with his tongue in her mouth was wearing contacts.

Awareness grew. Panic rose. Where was she? Where was her mother? She couldn't see where she was, but she heard the rising sound of chanting she didn't understand. Frantically she tried to twist, to writhe, to throw him off, but she was weak and the gray-eyed man seemed not even to notice.

Morlock* had drawn the short straw. Breaking into fall-out shelters was a good way to get a faceful of shotgun blast or worse, if they were occupied. On the other hand, they usually weren't, and finding an unbreached one usually meant a couple weeks of good eating, and his gang** hadn't had much luck lately.  After forcing the door open, the utter silence was promising, but the scene in front of him had taken precious seconds to make sense.  The old woman lay slumped over a table, arm dangling.  Eyes staring right at him. Foam on her lips.  Dead, but not very long.  A glance to the left revealed pantry stores-- empty.  Behind her, a survivalist kitchen setup with a jumble of gear; a water purification rig-- dry; and various utensils.  To the right-- whoah.

The young woman lay on a daybed which no doubt pulled out to be shared with the older woman in times past. Hair the color of midnight cascaded past her shoulders and pooled on the floor.  He'd never seen anyone with hair that long.  She was pale, so pale. Dead. That, he'd seen plenty of.

Instantly his mind rejected that. No. Not dead. He crossed the small room quickly and called to his comrades to stay back.

A kaleidoscope of want spun through his brain. He wanted her to be alive. To wake up. To be his. He wanted to protect her, from the men** who had always had his back (well, almost always). And from the dangers that they protected each other from.  From... everything.  He wanted to be worthy of her.

He wanted to hear her say his name.


--------------
*placeholder name -- but keeps my creative sense of the character where I want it

**I need a better name for the hero's band of unconventional, violent, but redeemable, comrades. Working on it.

So. That's the teaser. What do you think? Be gentle, this is my underbelly showing here.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED!!!


Photo Credit: Vidalia_11 on Flickr, used under the Creative Commons licensing.

Between the Duke and the Deep Blue Sea, by Sophia Nash - Review

Words Fail Me
I liked this book so much I don't even know how to review it.

Oh, sure, I've seen Nash's books around.  I follow her FaceBook page,  I've seen her comment here and there on various romance blogs.

And yet, I've never picked one up.  If you're like me, and you haven't either, for reasons you don't quite understand, I suggest you get the heck over it, because she is fantastic.  The cover blurb from the Chicago Times says it "Gleams with sharp wit" -- I don't know about gleaming, but the wit?  Verrrrrrrry sharp.

If you like Julia Quinn and Loretta Chase, I think you'll like Sophia Nash (and if you don't, then we can't be BFFs any more, because REALLY?? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU??)

So, I've read a lot of serial books that end with a cliff-hanger, but this might be the first book that starts with one. Literally.  Hanging from a cliff.



Here, I'm going to be a little lazy and pull a quote from the excerpt on Nash's page:

She looked toward the place from which she had fallen. “He saw me fall and he left me to die.

He slowly stood up.

“Where are you going?

He repositioned himself behind her and grasped her shoulders to ease the stiffness. “Can you feel your arms? How long were you waiting for him?”
“I don’t know. I think it all happened about half past four.”

God, she’d been there for nearly three hours.

ok, so in the middle here, they do a little more getting-acquainted schtick, but then, I just love this chapter-ending exchange:

She hesitated. “So, you’ll help me, then? Really?”

“Alexandre Barclay—your servant.” That ringing in his head, which always preceded regret, sounded in his ears. “So . . . what precisely did you have in mind?”

“Do you have a pistol?” She studied him with her big, round honey-colored eyes and a smile that made him nervous. “Or, perhaps, a lovely little dagger?”

The interactions between the couple are so light and delicious, and the farcical business with the would-be-brides so ridiculous (the one with the lisp was particularly memorable touch "Wittle animals, Yow Gwace?" -- she sounds just like Tweety Bird in my head)...that the reader almost forgets that the story opens with an attempted murder. And the murderer is more or less untouchable. After all, the whole cliff-hanging business is more than a bit cartoonish, as is the villain.

However, the story takes a surprisingly dark turn. If you think about it, there is really only one way that the problem of her limbo-ish marital status can resolve into a proper romance Happily Ever After, and it proves quite troublesome for both of them. Nash could have continued in the farcical vein, and done it very well, but I thought the touch of grittiness at the end lent some gravitas to the hero and made the HEA that much more appreciated.

Nash's prose really does speak for itself, she doesn't need me to find more reasons or conduct more analysis to convince you. Pick a book, flip to a random page, and I challenge you not to be drawn in. Strongly recommend!

The Rancher and the Rock Star, by Lizbeth Selvig - Review

My First e-Arc
It's true. As soon as I found out that the Avon Addicts would have access to electronic ARCs, I decided that was the push I needed to acquire an e-reader. As it happened, I made the purchase online about 3 days before my birthday. A day or two later, my husband and I had this conversation:

Him: So... what do you want for your birthday?
Me: You got me a Kindle! it will be here Wednesday. Thank you!
Him: Wow! I rock!

And everyone was happy.


After I figured out how to get a non-Amazon book onto the Kindle, this was the first book I read on the Kindle.


Summary: What's it About?
The title tells much of the story.  The hero Gray is indeed a rock star, while the heroine, Abby, lives a rural small-town life, struggling financially, but in most ways, living according to her principles, which I admired.  The two of them are brought together by their children, teenagers who met on-line.  Somewhat surprisingly, there isn't really a secondary romance here, as the two teens maintain more of a friends/sibling dynamic right from the start.  Gray's son Dawson runs away from his mother and hires on at Abby's ranch to help with chores.

The book opens with Gray coming after his son, and a rather lovely scene where he helps Abby with some heavy lifting, followed immediately by a thunderstorm - what a sexy beginning!  The conflict comes initially around Dawson and how one can reasonably parent a teenager while leading the life of a successful touring musician, and segues easily into resolving the differences in lifestyle between Abby and Gray.

The Good Stuff
I really liked the characters in this story, which to me is more than half the battle.  Gray and Abby, Dawson and Kim, and the assorted secondary folks were all crisp and 3-dimensional (you gotta love town with a cockatiel mascot).  There was good chemistry between Abby and Gray, in large part realized through some really excellent dialog.  I'm not sure how realistic the portrayal of the rock-star lifestyle was but it was exotic enough to be fun and mundane enough to feel pretty grounded.

The situation where Kim had a celebrity crush on Gray was unusual and fairly well-done.  I say "fairly," because knowing teens, I think Selvig might have pulled her punches on this a little bit; it resolved without getting too ugly or too convoluted.  To be honest, that's a path I was just as happy not to go down, but it would be fair to say that it was glossed over a little bit.

I also enjoyed the side plot with the drama among Gray's staff; it was interesting and served to emphasize the lifestyle differences.


The Down Side
There were times when the pacing dragged a little for me.  This is one of those things that is highly situational for me, so it might be no fault of the author.  This was also a first e-read for me, so it might've also been partly that--but overall it took me quite a bit longer than it usually would to read a book of this length.

There were also a number of similes that just seemed a little awkward and overblown, enough to be noticeable.  (If I were better at electronic bookmarking I would pull some quotes for you... but you'll have to either take my word for it or read it yourself to decide if I'm right.)  It's always surprising to me when an author's dialog flows naturally but the internal monologs and narration seems clunky -- it's so much more common for it to be the other way around.

One Last Comment
Selvig's tagline on her website header describes her work as "Contemporary Romance with a Twist of Faith" and I would call that pretty accurate.  Abby is a woman of faith, but this is portrayed with a light touch.  There are no scenes where she or Kim attend church; there are a few references to prayer, to faith, and to volunteering at the church.

In this particular book, I am pretty neutral on these touches.  Generally, I'm not a fan of religion in my romances, but it suited Abby's character and wasn't heavy-handed.  I suspect that readers who are looking for inspirational or strictly Christian romance would probably not find it religious enough.  For example, Gray and Abby don't really talk about their differences in that respect, and it seems pretty clear that Gray is not the church-going type. Then there's the premarital sex between Abby and Gray-- certainly not a problem in mainstream romance, but given Abby's character, even I thought the rationalization was a little weak:

Her well-meaning father had indeed drummed the sin of this unmarried act into her head, and Abby had passed the same morals on to Kim.  But Abby was not fifteen.  She was thirty-seven.  Married once.  Long past ignorance about safety, and tired of worrying about taboos she knew heaven didn't care about at her age.

And a little later, Gray says,

 ...there are things adults who've been married before can do that kids can't.  It's that simple.

So, I found all that a bit awkward... but for me, not enough reason to be a significant problem.

Bottom Line
Overall this is a light, entertaining, Cinderella-style romance with enough character development to carry it, and the rock star bit glams it up for some real fun.

Around the Blogosphere
Fellow Addict Grace at Books Like Breathing
Fellow Addict Amy at Unwrapping Romance
Reviews by Molly
Romancing the Books

Just a reminder, if you have reviewed this book, I am more than happy to include a link to your review.  You can leave your link in comments or email me, and I will edit it in.  I would especially like to link up with the other Addicts-- I'm looking forward to "meeting" you all electronically.

Feeding the Addiction: It Begins...

Talk about anticipation!  I had to go out of town on business last week and of course my first Avon Addict box arrived shortly after I left.  Finally, I got home this weekend and was able to break it open.

Look at it, just sitting there.  Doesn't it look innocent? It could be anything. It could be brussel sprouts.  Or some kind of guitar stuff for my husband, he orders those kind of things a lot.  Or, um... OK, I wasn't fooled.  I knew it was for me, all me. It's readerly goodness, and the first glance reveals.... 

YAY! Books, of course.  Whoah. Five copies of Sophie Nash's Between the Duke and the Deep Blue Sea? Looks like giveaway time!

Awww.  Lookit this cute stuff! That's a fireman's hat to promote new author Jennifer Bernard's hot new fireman series (review coming up!), a rubber duckie (which my daughter is calling dibs on) printed thusly:

The Art of Duke Hunting, a ducky new romance by Sophia Nash

Too fun! There's also a die with a slightly mysterious URL on it: rulesofscoundrels.com ... which leads me to Sarah MacLean's blog. Perhaps there's a gaming hell or two involved in these books?  She also sent along a pretty bookmark emblazoned: "Fetch the Smelling Salts," which cracked me up! The last of the book swag is package of bazooka bubble gum, referencing Rachel Gibson's newest. Apparently, the main character is thrown immediately into literary conflict of the direst kind: a bubblegum pink bridesmaid gown (shudders). I didn't sign up for horror novels!

Just for me, there is a cute Avon Addict button that I'll keep on my coat or something, a neat string bag, AND a very lovely cozy fleece blanket, the better for curling up to read.  I love that!

I understand there are hashtags involved in this whole Avon Addicts dealio.  Which might mean I need to start tweeting.  Or at least following some folks who do.  We shall see.

Relevant Links:

The Art of Duke Hunting, by Sophia Nash
Between the Duke and the Deep Blue Sea, by Sophia Nash
The Bachelor Firemen of San Gabriel series, by Jennifer Bernard
The Cowboy Takes a Bride, by Lori Wilde
How Miss Rutherford Got Her Groove Back, by Sophie Barnes (I do love that title!)
Confessions of a Slightly Neurotic Hitwoman by JB Lynn (well that sounds interesting...)
Rescue Me, by Rachel Gibson (hmm, I kind of hate that site.  Oh well.)