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Loading... Ruby - Book 1 Come By Chance Mail Order Brides: Sweet Montana Western Bride Romance (Come-By-Chance Mail Order Brides) (edition 2014)by Juliet James
Work InformationRuby - Book 1 Come By Chance Mail Order Brides: Sweet Montana Western Bride Romance (Come-By-Chance Mail Order Brides) by Juliet James
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Love is in the air in the town of Come-By-Chance!In this much-loved series strong women risk everything to rise above their desperate circumstances, find true love, and wed real men who'll treat them right.Meet Ruby - She's lost her Ma, and struck out into the world on her own. The good news is she's traveled to Pittsburgh and found a good job as a schoolmistress. The bad news is, the school's owner, the portly, whiskey-breathed Mister Murphy, has developed wandering hands, and Mrs Murphy's preparing to leave to visit her sister for a month in New York.Ruby sees an advertisement in the Matrimonial News and takes a desperate chance, writing away to the handsome Six-feet-four James Drinkwater.Will James be the answer to Ruby's plight? Is the handsome Montana man all that he seems? Or will someone else come to Ruby's rescue, so together they can find true love?Book 2, Emily, and Book 3, Violet, are now available too.Book 4, Kate, will be released in late October 2014. No library descriptions found. |
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Up until the midpoint of the novel, I was certain the hero and heroine were Ben and Ruby. After all, up 'til that point, no other characters have any share in the storytelling. Sure, Ben's brother Matt has a thought or two threaded willy-nilly into Ben's third-person narrative, but most of the tale belongs to Ben. And then Ruby gets to town...and falls arse over tea kettle for Matt, who also thinks she's the world's best thing since the great epic love story of his Ma and Pa!
Maybe this is one of those romances where the wrong brother ends up engaged to the heroine and the hero has to sweep in and Fix Everything?
Nope. Not one of those stories. Matt and Ruby end up married. The End. And I mean that literally: The End, that's all she wrote, there's no more to the book. They get married. The End.
Ms James has a knack, I think, for capturing the voice of the characters and making you care about what matters to them. But judging by Ruby, she has no idea how to tell a story about those characters and clearly lacks sufficient experience with the romance, or even the western, genre to understand and play with the tropes and mechanisms of those types of stories.
If you read Ruby as a tongue-in-cheek spoof of a Western romance, it has a certain charm, but I don't believe the author intended it as such. Instead, it's disappointing and peculiar and rather pitiful. ( )