Lucy Marsh loses her job as a seamstress and then finds out she and her two younger siblings are being evicted. Her parents are dead, and her stepmother is uninterested in caring for Lucy's brother and sister. And strange men have been skulking around and making threatening remarks to Lucy and her brother. When a childhood friend of her father's turns up and offers her a way to provide for herself and her siblings, Lucy feels she has no choice but to accept. His offer? Enter into a proxy marriage with his son Nate, then travel out to Texas to begin life anew there.
Nate Stanton knows marriage is a blessing. He just doesn't have time for it, what with trying to expand the family ranch while keeping his antagonistic neighbors at bay, and all that entails. He is plenty upset when his father shows up with a surprise wife for Nate, plus her two siblings. What could a short, scrawny city girl like Lucy hope to do on a Texas ranch? Sit around looking pretty? Nate does not have time for such nonsense.
But, of course, Lucy is more capable than Nate realizes. And Nate is kinder and more understanding that Lucy had even hoped. Together, they start to build a life together while trying to decide when they will both be ready to consummate their relationship.
Oh, yes, there is a LOT of dithering about that. Dithering and fretting and musing and dithering some more. To the point that I got rather frustrated with them both. Like, kids, I know you're both nervous about how this is going to go, but maybe it will go better if you stop thinking and worrying about it and just go ahead and get in bed together? Plenty of people throughout history have gotten married to people they basically didn't know, and I'm sure that creates a lot of awkwardness, but I think this book spun that all out a lot longer than was necessary. I would much rather have had a good chunk of the book explore their life together once they'd "done it" and discovered that sex is just one small part of a marriage. Important, yes, but not the be-all, end-all pinnacle of married life that it is too often built up to be. But, nope, not the route the book went. Oh well.
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for tasteful and non-explicit thinking about sex, some violence, kids in danger, and one fairly scary wolf attack.
This is my 37th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.
I think this book would probably irk me a little, lol.
ReplyDeleteI think it is reasonable and sensible for characters in a marriage of convenience situation to wait to get to know each other before they start sleeping together, but it doesn't have to turn into a huge "will-they-won't-they-and-if-so-WHEN-will-they" drama. Ideally, your characters should grow closer emotionally and then the physical intimacy can flow naturally from that, and it doesn't have to be a big deal.
Katie, I may have been slightly more harsh than I needed to be -- it just did seem to get belabored/built up more than necessary, and that bugged me.
DeleteBecause, yeah, it was very reasonable for them to take their time on this and get to know each other. Especially since they had her younger brother and sister living with them, which added some extra tensions. And especially because Nate actually didn't know about or agree to the proxy marriage. I was fully on board with them taking plenty of time to decide if this was going to work, and how to make it work.
However, once they decided, yes, they were going to consummate this marriage eventually, then that got turned into a really central part of the book and felt like this was getting drawn out solely to add romantic/sexual tension for as long as possible. It got to feeling forcibly drawn-out by the author, not a naturally slow progression anymore.
No, I totally get that! Especially if the characters have decided they do like each other well enough to make this a real marriage, then we in the audience don't need to be privy to a lot of drama about WHEN exactly they're going to sleep together. If we already know it's going to happen... then trying to make it suspenseful is going to feel forced.
DeleteKatie, yes. It ended up feeling like a way to add "will they/won't they" sexual tension in a way that would be palatable to Christian romance readers, which made it feel... unnecessary.
DeleteI had this book at one time... but I think I've since donated/sold it. And I cannot remember if I ever read it or not. I feel like I probably did because it may have been a tour read. I do know, back in the day, I read lots of books by this author. :)
ReplyDeleteRissi, I've enjoyed other things by Colleen Coble, but they were all set in the modern day, so I'm thinking maybe I just like how her style fits better with that setting.
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