This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by PamG. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romance Novella category.

Here is PamG's review:

I’m really the wrong person to review this novella. First of all, I’m not a huge fan of novellas, because I like an author to have space to really expand on his or her characters and settings. I love showing rather than telling and strong sensory impressions of person and place, and the novella format requires a certain efficiency that can seem sparse. Furthermore, I am not a huge fan of inspirational romance. In fact, I actively avoid it, though I don’t require sexy times in my romances (Hail Heyer!) and I have no problem with religion as a major component of a novel. I often find the absence of religion, in historical novels especially, to be downright annoying and unrealistic. What I do not like is a preachy world view that makes certain trite outcomes inevitable.  Some of those outcomes make my eyeballs bug out like Roger Rabbit.

So, given the above caveats, I might be expected to be mean about Love Letter to the Editor. However, to be fair, I’m not going to say much about the religious content of the story. I’m sure that it would be serious catnip for many readers, and I get that. Even the eyeball-bugging epilogue will have to remain undisclosed as it would be spoilerish as all get out, and shooting too many spoilers at a novella would seem mean. (Why does a novella even need an epilogue?)

I have to say that when I started reading Love Letter, I did not realize at first that it was meant to be “inspirational.” Even so, I knew by the end of the first chapter that this book wasn’t for me. My first impression was that the prose was wooden and the dialogue graceful as a stick insect. I care a lot about language, so if the writing doesn’t grab me, the coolest story in the world isn’t going to lure me in. As I read Love Letter, I was most strongly reminded of my husband’s collection of Louis L’Amour westerns. Back in the early days of our marriage, when I was gobbling up his dowr—er, library, I read quite a bit of L’Amour and other western authors. I usually enjoyed L’Amour’s stories, because I have always liked adventure in my reading, but L’Amour was practically allergic to contractions, particularly in the dialogue.  The result was an extremely stilted writing style. Robin Lee Hatcher’s westerners seem to be afflicted by the same condition. In addition, conversation is almost invariably polite, formal, and mostly spoken in complete, though short, sentences. Speech transmits information rather than emotion; feelings and character traits are conveyed by third person internal commentary rather that in speech.  Molly likes to quote the bard, though drama is completely foreign to her personality. Apparently she mutters, because most of the time Jack doesn’t understand a word she says.  It almost seems as if the dialogue was added as an afterthought once the story was on the page.

The story here is extremely linear and transparent, containing no surprises. The writing exactly matches the story, sticking to a pretty simple sentence structure and not a lot of gratuitous description. I know that many readers don’t care for a lot of embellishment in their stories; they like to focus on the characters and the romance. I like to mix it up a bit more than that, though a strong focus on the two main characters can be a delight.  However, Molly and Jack seemed kind of one dimensional to me. Molly wants to be the editor of Daddy’s small town newspaper and resents Jack being hired as the new editor. Jack takes the job as a way to fulfill his dream of exploring the west. Interestingly, this plot line has popped up in several contemporaries that I’ve read lately. It can be both intriguing and infuriating depending on how the author resolves the conflict over the job.  (Daddy is always a butthead though.)

One element that can raise this trope above the herd is how well the author presents the business or activity at the center of the conflict between hero and heroine.  In the case of “Love Letters,” there is very little description of small town journalism during the late 1800s, and that’s really a shame. We know that there’s typesetting, ads, and Molly’s radical column, but that’s about it.  For me, that’s not enough.

Jack left cosmopolitan Des Moines for Wyoming in pursuit of his longing for the west, two states to the left of Iowa. I didn’t find the realization of his dream all that impressive. Killdeer is a community in the tame, tame west.  There are references to the general store, the dust, the church, the boardwalks, and the barn dance, but none of these elements bring the town to life. While I don’t question the existence of these things, they gave me no sense of frontier life. Killdeer reads like the setting from a television western in the sixties, and frankly so does the action in this book, except more yawn-making. I realize that many of the dangers portrayed by old school westerns are far from authentic, and I wouldn’t want to see them reproduced in this sweet romance just for the sake of the drama, but life on the frontier was precarious in many practical ways that “Love Letters” completely ignores. Hell, there’s no weather in this story.

While the romance between Molly and Jack is sweet, there is not much in the way of chemistry. I’ve read stories with one or two kisses the sum total for physical interaction, and those stories made me sigh. Not so with “Love Letters.” I like Jack better that Molly because he is a genuinely decent guy and has a more interesting backstory. Molly is educated and knowledgeable about running a small town newspaper, and she supposedly is opinionated and outspoken. However, on the single occasion that she’s confronted, all she does is duke it out with her tear ducts while Jack leaps to her defense. Jack is pretty transparent, but Molly seems to be almost a collection of other people’s opinions that aren’t borne out by her actions. Neither Jack nor Molly truly shows much personal growth, though their circumstances do change by the end of the novella. Regarding that epilogue, I found it gaggingly conventional in its resolution of Jack and Molly’s respective dreams, and the result came across as grossly unbalanced and full of common, garden variety misogyny.

Overall, I would say that Love Letters to the Editor is a light, easy read with a definite Christian slant and a predictable ending.  While the writing is competent, I personally found the writing style and story-telling to be over-simplified and lacking in sensory or emotional depth, but some of this is no doubt due to the short format.  I gave the story a C grade because it truly isn’t badly written, and I think there are those who would really enjoy it, but if I was just grading it for myself, it would be an unapologetic D-.