Very cute

Early Oklahoma, ca. 1900. A young man wants to sow his oats with a local divorcee.
A great cast of characters in a small community with strict standards of propriety. Jedwin is a great guy, remarkably untarnished by his overbearing mother. ( )

Romance and humour.
This is a prime example of the effect of a cover on readers - I requested the audio version of this book through Audiobook Boom, having seen the cover showing a bicycle leaned up against a rustic wooden fence. After listening to the book I registered it on BookLikes, only to discover a pink cover with a couple encircled by flowers. I realised that if I'd been originally presented with the pink cover I wouldn't even have read the book content before passing it by. As it was, it took me a while to get into the book, as I'm not much of a Romance reader, but it was the sense of humour running through the narrative that kept me reading.

Jedwin Sparrow has decided he needs to spread some wild oats before thinking about marriage, and he reckons the best place to start is the local divorcee, Cora Briggs. She is horrified and prepares to send him packing, except for the temptation of taking revenge on the tittle-tattling ladies of the town, led by his mother.
Set in Oklahoma in 1906, there were serious implications with being involved with a divorcee; the community was fiercely judgmental and the poor young woman was labelled and blamed through no fault of her own.
Cora Briggs and Jedwin Sparrow were immediately likable characters, along with the rather plain daughter of the local vicar, Tulsa May Bruder, who I see becomes one of the main characters of the sequel, Runabout, which takes place ten years later.

The reading by Stevie Puckett was a bit drawn out and some of the women's voices rather shrill, but once I got involved with the story I became accustomed to this. I certainly had no problem with the clarity or consistency of her narration and I will keep an eye open in case she narrates the sequel. ( )

A very enjoyable romance. I was already a fan of Pamela Morsi's Simple Jess, and I was pleased to find that this was also excellent.

The hero is on the one hand a very well behaved and serious young man, and on the other hand he is still very youthful and naive. His mother is doing her best to keep him tied to her apron strings, and routinely manipulates him into doing whatever she thinks is best.

Our hero wants to get some sexual experience, but is warned off of visiting a bordello (as being a good way to catch something) and instead decides to call on the scarlet woman of his small town, the divorcée Cora.

Cora isn't all that pleased to have a young man (a few years younger than she is) come to her and ask if she will help him "sow his wild oats". What [quasi-respectable] woman would be?

Other interesting characters in the novel include Jed's widowed mother Amelia (the manipulator), Jed's employee in the family funeral business (Haywood), and the town matriarch Maimie, whose caustic personality casts Amelia's manipulations in the shade. ( )

This book was okay ( )