Title: Iron Cowboy
Author: Diana Palmer
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Nonnie’s back! Our favorite anonymous reviewer, back for more fun and reviews-in-list-formation with a look at Diana Palmer’s Iron Cowboy.
The One That Made Me Cry (With Laughter)
By Nonnie
There are a few things you need to know before you start reading a Diana Palmer novel:
There is a 95% chance biscuits will be involved.
Women’s rights are a nebulous, easily dismissed issue.
Any slang in the book will come straight out of the 70s, along with most clothing styles, despite the fact that the books are meant to be contemporary romances.
The hero will be at least 12 years older than the heroine, who is more often than not between 18 and 23 years old.
The heroine has an 85% chance of getting pregnant the first time they do it, and will know she is pregnant in minutes (due to an aversion to the smell of bacon).
IRON COWBOY (Silhouette Desire #1856, 2008) has all the hallmarks of a typical Diana Palmer romance and more. MUCH MORE. As such, think of this more as a MST3K of the book, rather than a true review. In other words, I will be breaking it down for you, and this entire post is a big old spoiler alert. Please don’t let that get in the way of buying and reading it for yourselves, because DAMN, you guys. This is genius. Okay, now that that’s out of the way, on with the show.
1. Our heroine is Sara Dobbs, a 19 year old, innocent assistant manager of a bookstore in Jacobsville, TX, population less than 2000. (As we have seen through many previous books, for every one regular citizen in Jacobsville there are 5 mercenaries, 7 ranchers, and 10 drug dealers.)
2. On page 2 of the book we find out Sara has a sad past. Her parents did dangerous work abroad. (This is left deliberately vague at this point, but the implication is missionary work.) Her dad died violently, Sara and her mother move back home to her grandfather’s house in Jacobsville, and her mother becomes an alcoholic slut as a result of the tragedy. WOE. After being beat up by the children of her mother’s most recent lover, Sara runs home battered and bruised and her mother, riddled with guilt, vows to turn over a new leaf. But then a few days later…Sara quits thinking about it and we don’t find out what happened. If you’re wondering why this back story is dumped onto page 2, I AM TOO.
3. Our hero is the mysterious Jared Cameron. He recently rolled into town and bought the White Horse Ranch lock, stock, and barrel. Jared shows up at the bookstore and berates Sara for the lack of hardcovers and financial magazines. Then he tells her he likes mystery novels, biographies, first person adventure novels, and “anything factual on the North African campaign of World War II”. All righty then.
4. Jared orders books and wants them delivered and bitches about the time that will take. Jared, there is something called Amazon.com. Look it up. Sara meanwhile wants to charge him a $10 delivery fee for having to drive 6 miles out of town. Way to encourage repeat customers, Sara.
5. After the books come in, Sara talks to Tony the Dancer (Jared’s bodyguard. I KNOW. SO WEIRD.) and arranges a delivery time. “The voice had a decidedly Southern accent. Not a Texas one, a Georgia one, if she were guessing. She had an ear for accents. Her Grandfather had taught students from all over the country and around the world at Jacobsville Community College, and he often brought them home.” ORLY? A town population less than 2,000 would be able to not only sustain a community college, but would attract people from all over the country and the world?
6. As I mentioned earlier, Jacobsville is a hotbed of drug dealing activity. Despite the fact that there have been multiple shootouts wherein the drug dealers ALWAYS lose, and despite the fact that there’s a bunch of former military, mercenary, and law enforcement ranchers living in and around the town, they keep coming back and trying to set up new meth labs and shit. Drug dealers aren’t very smart.
7. You know who else isn’t smart? Sara. She is a single woman, living alone, and doesn’t own a cell phone. Nice.
8. Oh, and you’ll be happy to know that Sara has conservative morals, goes to church, and doesn’t “give out” on dates. I bet that prissy bitch doesn’t “put out”, either.
9. A few weeks later, having gone on a date with another man (hussy!), Sara stumbles across Jared at the local cemetery. The funeral he went to in Jacobsville 8 months prior was his daughter’s. Sad. He decided to bury her there because his grandfather lived in Jacobsville.
10. Chit-chat at the cemetery leads to Jared and Sara agreeing to be each other’s family and take care of each other when they’re sick. I don’t even know. What I do know is that this is some mighty big foreshadowing!
11. Sure enough, less than a week later Sara almost dies of a perforated appendix. Of course, since it ruptured, she had to have old-school, cut you wide open surgery, instead of the much easier to recover form laparoscopic option. Foreshadowing, part two.
12. Jared whisks Sara back to his ranch to recuperate, amongst heated sexual tension and mysterious talk of enemies closing in. But no worries! Sara will be kept completely in the dark and should be in no danger, right?
13. Upon arrival at Jared’s ranch, Sara meets Max, Jared’s supremely unprofessional, super seductive looking female attorney. Max is pissed and jealous of Sara, naturally.
14. A few days later, Sara is back at home and back at work. Still a bit sore, she attends a local barbeque in the company of Harley, a cowboy at a local ranch. Jared is there with – oh noes! – Max. DRAMA.
15. There seems to be some confusion about Sara’s incision. On Sara’s part, sadly. After first getting out of the hospital, she remarks that it’s a 6 inch incision. Now, at the barbeque, she says its 4 inches. That’s…a pretty big difference.
16. Holy cow. Max done lost her mind. Sara laughs at something and Max, believing herself to be laughed at, hauls off and slaps Sara right across her laughing mouf. I’m pretty sure that behavior is unacceptable anywhere, and at any time. Other than in soap operas. And yet Max is astonished when she is kicked off the property.
17. You know what else people in Jacobsville can do? DANCE. Is a mutha-effing dance-off, y’all! The Caldwell’s are doing a spirited Paso Doble, but then the Grier’s challenge them to a Tango. I’m totally not kidding here, guys. In a previous book there was a dance battle to the Macarena. THE MACARENA. Only 10 years after the fad came and went too. That’s practically current, by Palmer’s standards!
18. Jared returns from taking Max home, sweeps Sara off her feet, and then takes her home. He bluntly tells her he’s too old for just kisses, and that if she doesn’t want more she should tell him now and he’ll leave and end it tonight. Poor dumb Sara. Her internal thought process goes something like this: “I should tell him to leave, but he’s super hot. I’m a good girl! But he’s sooo dreamy. Surely he doesn’t want to have sex? He just wants some heavy petting. Yeah, that’s all he wants. And really, if it gets out of hand, I’ll just tell him to stop!” Poor poor Sara.
19. Sure enough, she is pretty much date raped on the couch. She loves the heavy petting and foreplay, but when shit gets real, she wants no part of it. Too bad a semi-drunk Jared doesn’t get the picture. When he comes out of his orgasm coma, he realizes Sara is not having fun. His reaction is not to soothe and reassure her of course, it’s to bitterly complain about small town girls and their repressed attitudes. Of course, once he figures out she vas a virgin he’s totally kind and gentle and understanding, right? HELLS NO. He is all “but you’re on birth controls, right? RIGHT? No? FUCK. I suppose you want all my monies now, hoor! But the joke is on you! I don’t want any more children, so you’ll either abort this hypothetical child, or I will sue you so the whole world can see you for what you are!!!!11!!1!!” (Sue her for what, I wonder? Not aborting her child? CLASSY.)
20. After this awesome reaction, Jared halfheartedly hopes he didn’t hurt her, and Sara retires to her room in a fit of well-earned catatonia.
21. Oh Sara. She is gazing at the fallen woman in her bedroom mirror. Unlike most Palmer heroines, she does know there’s such a thing as a “morning after pill” but her reasoning for not using it is that she would have to see a local doctor for it and that then the whole town would know about it. HONEY. Doctor-patient confidentiality. Look it up.
22. Jared, wracked with pseudo-guilt, gets blitzed the next day at his ranch. Max the whorish attorney didn’t leave as ordered, and instead is lying in wait. Catching Jared at a vulnerable moment, she convinces him that Sara was the aggressor and deliberately set out to seduce him. Jared agrees to let Max handle things, with a feeble “don’t hurt her”. This is some telenovela shit, this is.
23. Bright and early Monday, Max shows up at the bookstore with a check for 10,000 dollars and a crazy story. Seems as though Jared has been hiding out in Jacobsville because three “illegal aliens” from South America have come up to kidnap him and hold him for ransom. Seems that Jared is an oil magnate who foiled a group of terrorists that targeted his South American oil pipeline. The survivors are determined to kidnap him even though he no longer owns that pipeline? Because that way they’ll recoup some monies? I don’t even know. Long story short: BAD GUYS IS COMIN’! Only not really, because according to Max, they were apprehended outside Virginia that very day.
24. After more cutting words Max seems to realize that Sara may not have had a fantastic time with Jared. She finds out her true age and is like OMGWTFBBQ!!1! and backtracks like mad. You know you’ve been a dick when the no-good, aggressive, she-demon realizes you’ve crossed the line. Way to go, Jared.
25. Jared finds out the truth and feels awful. About time. Tony finds out the truth and hates Jared. Go Tony! Max turns out to be mega-dumb as apparently she inadvertently gave away her boss’s location and information to terrorists going by the super-obvious terrorist name “the Reconquistas”. Good thing they were apprehended…OR WERE THEY?
26. The next morning, Sara shows up at the bookstore and notices a beat up van in the parking lot. Her boss Dee is leaving to go to the bank and pick up some coffee, and they remark upon the van as she heads out. Shortly after she leaves, THREE STRANGE MEN walk into the bookstore. Shits about to get real, y’all.
27. They are tall and swarthy and muscular! She knows what the people in Jacobsville look like, these men is dark and foreign looking! They must be terrorists! (Apparently no Hispanics live in this tiny Texas town near the border?) And holy craps, she is too far from the phone (only they haven’t made a move toward her yet). And she only has the pocket knife she uses to cut open boxes with as defense! WHAT IS SHE GON’ DO?
28. And then. Guys. Seriously. Now comes the part in the book that literally made me cry with laughter. I mean, to the point that I stopped reading, called a few friends, and practically pissed myself laughing as I tried to adequately explain what happened. SRSLY. Sara realizes she only has one shot. And HOLY CRAP is it a long shot. And here is where I quote verbatim from the book:
“If she stabbed herself with the pocketknife and they could see blood, and she pretended to be unconscious and tried to look dead, they might be startled into leaving.”
I KNOW I WOULD BE STARTLED INTO LEAVING.
So let’s just recap for a second. Sara sees three strange swarthy (aka dark skinned furriners) men walk into the bookstore. She immediately thinks “terrorists!” even though they have yet to make any threatening move toward her. Too far from a phone (I guess? Now that I am rereading, she makes no mention of the phone as an option before she comes to this awesome plan of action) she decides her only chance is to STAB HER OWN FOOLISH ASS and play dead. Even better! She figured that since she knows where her appendicitis incision is, she will stab herself there since there probably isn’t anything vital nearby. Except maybe your freaking KIDNEY.
29. Then we get this:
“You come with us,” one of the men said in accented English. “We see you with the lawyer. You are Cameron’s woman. He will pay for you.”
“I am nobody’s woman. I will die before I go with you!” she said. And giving up a silent prayer, she jabbed the pocketknife into the incision, through her blouse. “Ooooh!” she cried, because it did hurt.
She crumpled to the floor with blood on her hands and shirt. She sighed heavily and held her breath. She looked dead.
The men hesitated. They’d planned well, and now their hostage had committed suicide right in front of them!
30. Let’s recap. She jabbed herself with a POCKETKNIFE. Which probably had, what? A 2 to 3 inch blade, tops? Into her SIDE. She squeaks out a little “oooh!” and collapses and the freaking terrorists believe she’s dead? Also “they’d planned well”? ORLY? They decided to confront her in an open bookstore during business hours on a main street with passing traffic? Instead of following her home and nabbing her at night? And yet this is an example of master planning? No wonder they’ve been so successful. BRILLIANT.
31. Lucky for her, Harley shows up wearing a side-arm he uses to shoot rattlers on the ranch. The no-doubt incredibly confused terrorists make a run for it. To her credit, Sara admits to Harley that she stabbed herself, and to his credit, Harley is super confused by that. The chief of police comes by the hospital later to tell her that the three “Arabic” prisoners who were apprehended in Virginia escaped the day before, and were presumed to be the same guys who menaced her. The chief, upon hearing of her improvised stabbing, SMILES AT HER WITH RESPECT. WITH RESPECT. Ahahahaha!
32. The three kidnappers are caught, and Tony the Dancer comes to see her in the hospital. He offers to care for her while she’s recovering from her latest injury, and when she asks what Jared will think he tells her he is quitting now that the terrorists have been caught. Rightly assuming she’s the cause of the problems between Tony & Jared, Sara flushes. The doctor sees the flush, immediately assumes she has been sexxoring Jared, and asks to speak to her privately.
“You don’t have to say it. I read faces very well. What do you want to do?”
She started to deny it. She knew better. (Dr.) Coltrain was a force of nature. “I can’t kill an ant,” she said.
So is she pregnant? WHO KNOWS. All we know is that she can’t kill ants!
33. Tony chooses this moment to reveal that he was there when Sara was almost killed in Africa as a child. He was an American mercenary in the firefight that killed her father and gave her a traumatic brain injury. Okay. Thanks for letting us know, Tony!
34. Tony takes Sara home where they talk about his tragic past, Jared and his bone-headedness, and the future. Sara gets a phone call – the children’s book she’s been working on (off stage, of course) has been accepted by Mirabella publishing! She’s gonna be an author, y’all! And she gets paid and everything!
35. Then Jared shows up and the truth is out. Sara was only 10 when a grenade blast killed her daddy and scrambled her brains. She still has a piece in there! That’s why she has trouble color matching and remembering some things! WOE. WOOOOOOE! Jared feels like a dick.
36. A lot of boring stuff happens, and long story short, Tony is going to jail to get in with the kidnappers so when they’re released on bail they will be caught in the act of kidnapping. Jared is staying with Sara and they’re talking about this potentially one week old zygote like it is the real deal. Everyone loves a babby, right? RIGHT!
37. Oh! Also. In addition to being an oil tycoon, Jared used to be a securities expert, and prior to that was a cop in San Antonio, and before THAT he was in the Special Forces. Just how old is this fool, anyway?
38. Everything goes pretty much according to plan, the kidnappers are facing real charges now, and Jared asks Sara to marry him. There’s just one problem. She is afraid of sex now! Yup, Jared was soooo good last time that he gave the poor girl a phobia. Cue Barry White music and a slow, gentle lovemaking session.
39. Wonder of wonders, after a quickie wedding and a discussion of soccer (yeah, I don’t even know WTF brought that on), Sara tells Jared that she received her monthly visitor so there’s no baby as of yet. Jared tells her they will wait to start a family and will instead explore the world and find her a bookstore to own. MARRY ME, JARED!
I guess the moral of the story is, when a woman is feeling menaced she should forget about screaming for help, and should instead stab her appendix with the nearest sharp object. (Diana Palmer, Smart Bitches, Harlequin and their parent companies are not responsible for any of the said injuries should you indeed stab yourself.)
(SB Sarah adds: Thanks a LOT, Nonnie. Now I have “Hold me closer, Tony Dancer,” stuck in my head. Great.)
Iron Cowboy is available at Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Kobo | All Romance eBooks.
@Ann – Thanks, but like I said, I’ve been told too many times that I’m too fat to be seen with to really believe that.
That’s okay. I’ve got music and dogs. Who needs a man or a baby anyway?
@Jami, I crap one Diana Palmer novel all over that idea. The best guys look for the beautiful woman within. If modern guys aren’t smart enough to see the person inside, confusion to ‘em. That said, I got one of the last smart ones 23 years ago.
Maybe these guys should read more romance novels. Just, don’t give ‘em a Palmer title…you might set Lurrve back several centuries.
Besides the biscuit obsession, the stilted dialogue, the descriptions of dated clothing (all of the clothes sound like they are from the 1980s) and the abundance of former mercenaries, the thing that I love to hate about Diana Palmer’s books are the incredible machinations she uses to:
1. Keep the heroines virginal. Even if they are married, chances are they are virgins because of some sort of strange twist (the husband is gay, the husband is impotent, the husband is only married to said heroine for revenge, etc.).
2. Make the readers feel sorry for the heroine. It isn’t enough for her to be poor, she must be poor and alone (no family or a good-for-nothing family) or poor and abused or poor and mentally not right (there’s another DP novel where the heroine’s big secret is that she was thrown head-first into a wall, which resulted in a memory glitch).
The best/ worst example of DP keeping the heroine downtrodden is in a book (I have blocked the name) where all the characters believe the heroine (who is a virgin widow because her late husband was gay) is suicidal. I think that her housekeeper finds her passed out on the bed with an empty whiskey bottle and a gun, plus the housekeeper finds an empty bottle of sleeping pills. The heroine supposedly is not suicidal; there are some very strange explanations to her behavior, including the fact that the heroine was trying to kill a mouse with the gun.
Spam word: length34. I think that says it all 😉
Terri, this is very interesting, because it was an extremely common device in 1950s romance (or British examples, anyway), for reasons which made perfect sense at the time. Because of the general prohibition against even alluding to sex between unmarried couples, let alone depicting it as something quite normal, having the h/h already married at the start enabled the author to have a final reconciliation scene that led straight into the bedroom (the door of which was firmly closed in the reader’s face) as the big climax. So to speak. The virginity was essential, because if she had had sex with anyone else before the husband, she would be a Bad Woman, not a heroine at all.
I read many women’s magazine serials in the 50s that used that trope. It made sense in terms of dramatic impact: overcoming the ‘ritual death’ moment, reconciling the h/h, and hailing their everlasting love falls a bit flat if they then have to go away and plan a wedding for several weeks before they can even have sex.
How times have changed. But one of the reasons I though Diana Palmer was, umm, an older lady in the early 1980s was her attachment to these traditional devices, which seemed old-fashioned to me even though I was middle-aged myself by then.
AgTigress, I completely agree with your assessment. It was a very common theme in earlier romance novels, and it continues to pop up in many Harlequin Presents (Lynne Graham and Penny Jordan both come to mind). My issue with DP’s approach is that she is so over-the-top with the lengths she goes to ensure that her heroines are virginal and completely naive. If she set her stories in the past (like the 1950s), this might make some sort of sense. However, in her modern (I use this term very loosely) works, I find it maddening.
BTW, I love your initial assessment of DP. Her plots, along with her dialogue, makes it appear that she is older (for lack of a better word) than she really is.
OMG, one of the funniest reviews I’ve ever read. It’s a close second to one from Dear Author regarding an erotic romance.
I am sooooo over Diana Palmer. I actually threw her book, Beloved across the room. Her heroines are ninnies who ALWAYS allow the uber-Alpha male to take over their lives without a whimper. Plots are predictable and contrived, and the dialogue silly. This one sounds like it runs along the same lines. What I can’t believe is that Harlequin publishes the damned things. I also agree with AgTigress and Terri. Make them period pieces so the heroine doesn’t sound and act like a refugee from a time machine.
@Deb – Actually, I’ve always said men should read their girlfriends’/wives’ favorite romance novels because it’ll give them insist to what those women want.
And not to turn this into a pity-me thing – hey, it’s on page 2 anyway, I notice very rarely does anything page 2 or further get a reply so probably no one will ever read it. Yay! Cause I’d rather just have the last word on the subject and drop it.
But as for me, I’m sorry, I just can’t accept I’ll ever be wanted. I’ve been told too much for too long that I’m ugly and worthless to believe that. (And then there were the guys who also called me a c**t, threw food at me and either mooed or oinked, etc.) Even my own mom informs me I’m too fat and too much of a slob for a man to ever want.
It’s okay though, I don’t like sex, find it too painful and nasty. (No, I wasn’t raped or molested. Lots of bladder & kidney problems as a kid so some doctor was always hurting me in the name of making me better.) And I do better by myself. I just have to accept I’ll always be alone. It’s better this way. No one can hurt me.
Still want to be the inspiration behind a good romance novel heroine though! LOL But NOT a Diane Palmer one! (And God forbid I ever inspire Nicolas Sparks. Not only do I think his stuff isn’t romantic, I find him downright boring!)
Wow…after reading this review I felt the sudden urge to raid my mother’s Harlequin stash and find a Diana Palmer. I’d always wanted to try a western and it was an experience! ^^
I read Rogue Stallion, and it was a good thing that a.) I knew it was published originally in ‘94, and b.) That this review lead me to see what to expect, and I wasn’t all that horrified.
The heroine was contrived and sort of doormat-ish, but she had some level of backbone that it seemed others lacked, which was nice. And despite no Pre-Marriage Sex, she managed to make some pretty steamy scenes. Her writing sucks though, which means she’s lucky I don’t have expectations for pleasure reading. It wasn’t horrible, but it definitely was not something I’d recommend to everyone. Or most people. Or anyone.
Damn
I live in a tiny TX town with a pop. of less than 2000 and I’ve never even seen a mercenary. (well, there was that one girl in elementary school who’s uncle was in Special Forces, but he must be 60 by now…) I need to move to Jacobsville! I’ve never even been invited to a dance-off 🙁 We do have Middle Eastern people though! I’ve seen ‘em!
I loved the review. How perfect. For some reason I do not understand, every once in a while I pick up one of her books. I know I am going to regret it every time. I had actually picked this book up at the Goodwill store about a month ago. I stopped reading it in the middle and I actually put it in the trash rather than put it back in circulation. I cannot, cannot, cannot understand how someone who writes so horribly keeps getting published. It must be because of morons like me.
If a person I was going to abduct suddenly stabbed herself, I think I’d leave, too. I wouldn’t want such an obviously high-maintenance hostage.
Wait, they live in TX, the “terrorists” came from South America…and they were caught outside Virginia? Poor navigators on top of being crappy planners. They should go into a different line of work.
Someone else may have clarified this, but: YES, Really.
My fella was prez of a college in the Texas panhandle (Clarendon College, look it up) in a town of LESS than 2000 (it topped that number only when the students were in town). The county did have a population of around 3,000 (and approx. 300,000 cows). It had a service area covering 8 rural counties in Texas, a satellite campus in Pampa and another in Childress (though the Childress one did not have its own building).
CC had students from all over the country, and the world—they had a bunch of students from Australia during our time there because several of the guys came to play baseball, and brought friends and girlfriends. There were also students from Canada and lots of other states because of the Judging team. I know. Sounds weird. But the judging of livestock, meats and other things is a big deal. (Where do you suppose they get the judges for the livestock shows and rodeos?) And CC’s team is nationally known, in those circles, because they win a lot of competitions. So yeah, they get students from all over.
Clarendon is one of the two smallest community colleges in Texas. The other one is Ranger College in the town of Ranger (which may be larger. I don’t know.) But colleges that size do exist in Texas, and prosper (sorta), and they do attract students from all over. Really.
And now that I have bored anyone who cares to read about it with more than you really want to know about community colleges in Texas, I will take my leave, and go read more about this wild-sounding book.
THIS! It’s This that I find MUCH more unbelievable than the community college. I lived 8 years in that >2000 population Panhandle town. I also lived in a town of about 8,000, and worked in one that pushed 10,000. And NONE of those towns were able to support a bookstore!!!
There was a used bookstore in Clarendon for a while, but it went bust about the time we moved there and sold all its stock and donated the rest to the library. (There was a pretty darn good library there.) But even the larger towns could not support used bookstores. Somebody tried to start one in Hillsboro (the larger town) but it didn’t last a whole year. In Clarendon, there was a store that was a gas station-convenience store-pharmacy-jewelry store-video rental-deli all in one. That one did pretty good business.
Anyway, my point is that small town businesses don’t usually extend themselves to bookstores. More stores that provide necessities. (And there was a library.) I live in a town of 40,000 now, and the lone bookstore (used) is struggling.
I just read this review and loved it! I thought I would wet my pants because it was so accurate!
I actually read this book when it first came out and was appalled by it. The significantly older, rich and educated guy verbally abuses and essentially molests the mentally impaired girl. What a basis for a lasting relationship! Ugh!
I would love to see someone write a spoof of a Jacobsville story featuring a liberal lesbian coming to town and stealing the young, sexy wife from one of these old mercenary turned rancher guys. Now that would put a new spin on things! 🙂
I would love to see someone write a spoof of a Jacobsville story featuring a liberal lesbian coming to town and stealing the young, sexy wife from one of these old mercenary t
I read this book several weeks ago. Let me just say, I found that Jared, (Despite his terrorist problems,) acted just like a real man. It was refreshing to have more real life reaction from our hero than what is usually portrayed in romance novels. So the first time wasn’t a life-altering experience, at least, not for him. For poor Sarah, well, I wouldn’t blame her if she never had sex again. But then again, drunk men can be real asses.
Sarah had alot of crap in her life, and one would expect that even though she was young, she would have some common sense. Only in the world of make-believe would a pocket knife and a side wound confuse terrorists.
I must confess, I was laughing at that scene.
And I liked Max. Always had a soft spot for the cut-throat bitch type.
That review was just too funny! Thanks for ending my coffee break with a laugh.Don’t think I’d buy the book, though.
OMG! THANK YOU! This review is so spot on! I don’t know why I let myself get sucked into reading Diana Palmer every so often—I think I’m reverting to my Barbara Cartland childhood—but every time the book ends with me being disappointed by her predictable story-line. Thank you so much for validating what I feel each time I finish one of her books. There is such promise in the thought of mercenaries, cowboys, and Texas (oh my!) that is so totally crushed by a little girl who can’t seem to take care of herself without the help of some older man. A woman can be old fashioned without being nauseating!
What’s up with the virginity thing? Why do none of these girls date in high school like normal kids? Even if she took some sort of Bible based, abstinence ed virginity pledge, she wouldn’t have “saved” herself for Mr Right (and by Right I mean Mr $$$$). Seriously, by 19 years old she’s have 3 kids (and there’d be a good chance it would be with 3 different men). As somebody who came from one of those towns the only people hanging around after age 18 are the ones who had a bunch of kids, dropped out, and are now hooked on meth. If you don’t get out of small town rural America immediately after high school graduation it means you’re probably a loser…and will remain one the rest of your days.
Oh, and there’d be no bookstore unless it was at the local community college…and there isn’t a community college in every tiny town. There’s usually one for an entire county.
Oh, and I seriously doubt the sight of dark-skinned men would be all that novel in Texas. Half the population of the SW is non-white.