Book Review

Mail-Order Bride Secret (Montana Mail-Order Brides Book 5)

Linda Ford

Rating: * * *

A lot of the romance novels I’ve read over the past year or two have disappointed me. Partly, that’s because I tend to read books that don’t cost a lot. Seriously, paying $9.99 for a light romance novel that will take less than a week to read just rubs me the wrong way, but charging that much doesn’t bother traditional publishers at all. And so I read a lot of free and discounted indie books. It’s even better if they’re in KU.

In trying to avoid another disappointing read, I went to Goodreads and looked for an author I’d rated highly in the past. That’s how I chose a book by Linda Ford. In fact, I bought not only book five, but the rest of the books in this series. I’d rated one book in the series at five stars (yes, I’m stingy with perfect ratings), a few four stars, and one, two stars. Telling myself every author writes a stinker now and then, I ignored the two-star rating.

Mail-Order Bride Secret, which has an average rating of 4.5 on Amazon, started out on a positive note. As the title implies, the bride in this one has a secret she’s afraid of revealing, especially to the man whose letters she’d responded to. Instead, she tells him she’s a widow to explain the eighteen-month-old little boy she has with her.

From the beginning, the author makes clear this is Christian fiction, first by telling you that Madeline, the heroine, hasn’t prayed in more than two years when her prayers to God went unanswered. So right away, you know she has been a believer, but something happened that caused her to turn her back on God. Not too much later, Wally, the hero, shows he’s a good person by saying he’d never turn his back on children, which is exactly what Madeline fears will happen to her son should anyone discover how he came to be. And he always says grace before a meal. This is all positive to me, since I’ve run into a lot of “Christian fiction” that seemed to randomly throw in the faith element as if to satisfy some minimal quota rather than having it be organic to the story.

On the other hand, there’s nothing that will take me out of a story faster than grammar, punctuation, and usage errors, and those started showing up all too often for my taste. There’s software to catch these errors, and it doesn’t take all that long to proofread a book before it’s published.

And then there was the first of several situations which showed up with no mention of the action that happened earlier to make them possible. Maddie’s son, Jonny, gets sick. He’s running a fever, very flushed, and cranky. This provides her with an excuse to stay with her child rather than sharing a bedroom with her husband. This provides some conflict since he’s insisted from the beginning that he wants “a real marriage”, and Maddie promised him that. Jonny recovers, but the twins (who sneaked aboard the train she took out west to be with her) later also get sick, but they show a definite rash, and from the symptoms, it’s clear they have measles. But there’s nothing about where the measles that spread through the children on the ranch came from to begin with.

Then, in caring for one of the twins, there’s this partial sentence: “the herbal medicines one of the ladies brought over earlier in the week”. Since a lot of the book at this point has been what Maddie and Wally are doing for the sick children, it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t have used this herbal medicine during at least one earlier scene.

This kind of thing got worse the closer to the end of the book I read. For instance, the secret, which Maddie has justified keeping to herself many times throughout the book, she blurts out toward the end. Like the author figured it was time to have Wally know because there were enough words in the book.

I don’t want to go into too much more detail about this because I don’t want too many spoilers in case you’re reading this and will enjoy the book as much as those who rated it four stars or more. I will give the next book in the series a chance since I’ve enjoyed other books by Linda Ford, and there are some parts at the end where this story resolved nicely, but I’m going to read a different author first, another author who I’ve really enjoyed in the past.