RITA Reader Challenge Review

“The Husband Maneuver” by Karen Witemeyer

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Phyllis L. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romance Novella category.

The summary:

1890s Texas

Marietta Hawkins has been in love with ranch foreman Daniel Barrett since she came home from school three years ago. Unfortunately, her father’s rule about hands not fraternizing with his daughter has kept him out of reach. She believed patience would prove a virtue in winning him over–until now. He is leaving. Starting up his own spread. To have any hope of maneuvering him into a proposal, she has to act fast or lose him forever. Fans of A Worthy Pursuit will enjoy seeing these characters again!

Here is Phyllis L.'s review:

Marietta “Etta” Hawkins is the twenty-one year-old daughter of a ranch owner in 1892 in Texas. She runs the household and takes care of all the woman-slash-house stuff. Her father is extremely protective and warns all his ranch hands not to even think about “making advances” or they’ll be fired. He has fired several men.

Daniel Barrett is the ranch foreman who has been breeding and training mules on the side and is in the process of buying his own ranch. He’s a former bounty hunter and the subject of a series of dime novels about Dead-Eye Dan, which are mostly fiction and which irritate him for glorifying violence.

The two of them have been attracted for years, neither knowing the other one is interested beyond basic friendliness. When the dad and most of the hands go off on a trail drive, leaving Daniel behind to keep an eye on things, Etta decides to take her chance and instead of staying in town with her aunt, gets someone to drop her back off at the ranch to do, uh, stuff. (You know: really important stuff! Honest, Aunt Ada.) Etta’s out there with no chaperone to get a chance to declare her love.

Does she not know that her dad has forbidden the men from flirting with her? I don’t think that was in the story anywhere. Because if she did and she had been trying for years to get Daniel’s attention, she would have known that she was putting him in a bad position, him being so honorable and all.

She was juvenile and didn’t come across to me as a twenty-one year old, though if all the men she ever met were ranch hands who weren’t allowed to flirt, she maybe wouldn’t know how to act around men. She had stayed with Aunt Ada in town several times and you’d think there were young men there who didn’t work for her dad. For being an Inspie, there’s no mention of going to church, where she would presumably see male human beings. There are no female friends, either, for that matter.

Daniel is twelve years older and has a great deal of life experience (see: bounty hunter), so I didn’t understand what he saw in Etta. She was pretty and ran the household well, which would be useful to him, but she acted like she was about sixteen (which would have been the age when they first met five years ago. And I hadn’t thought about it until now, so I’m a little squicked) (though they’ve only been pining for each other since she was eighteen. Or something.)

Anyway, my point there was that other than how hot she is (and this is an Inspie, so Dan has no fantasies about sex, though his arms ache to hold her and his knees go weak. In the last scene, they’re married and he takes her hair down and they make out on the sofa) I don’t see the attraction from his side.

Also, she idolizes him and reads all those dime novels about Dead-Eye Dan that he hates, so she doesn’t seem to have a clear idea of what there is about him that’s special.

He eventually finds her stash of dime novels and gets mad. She goes all drama queen and sobs that the novels let her “pretend that a part of you could actually belong to me” and immediately gives up her campaign and avoids him. Because of course. It takes him a few days to realize that he’s going to have to make the next move because now she thinks he’s not interested.

OK, so he was going to wait until he had quit working for her dad, but still, he could have said something about how he would court her once he had his own ranch. Once he finally figures it out, her dad walks in on them kissing. OF COURSE. But after he says Dan’s fired, they have a man-to-man talk in which the dad gives permission.

I mostly liked this novella, don’t get me wrong. The series of contretemps and ways Etta threw herself in Dan’s path were amusing. The way he stomped around and acted mad all the time instead of explaining himself went a bit too far into Big Misunderstanding territory, but he’d been hiding his feelings for so long, he didn’t realize the time had come to show them.

I wasn’t convinced she was grown up enough for him. She comes across as whiny and teenager-y instead of growing into an adult who has a chance of understanding Daniel. I didn’t feel convinced that this was going to be an HEA and that Dan wasn’t going to get annoyed with her by the end of their honeymoon.

I’m going to give it a B-.

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The Husband Maneuver by Karen Witemeyer

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  1. Rose says:

    Question for the Bitchery at large!

    I am not the target audience for Inspies, and I haven’t read many, so my knowledge of them is primarily gleaned from Lifetime movie adaptations and reviews on this site. (I certainly respect the heck out of writers and readers of Inspies–my personal tastes are no reflection on the quality of a writer!)

    I have the general impression that the female protagonists of Inspies skew younger in mental and emotional attitudes. This (very good) review and the earlier one of the same novel both mentioned that the heroine seemed immature, and especially so in contrast to the hero.

    For those who have a greater familiarity with the Inspie subgenre: do the heroines really seem markedly less mature than in other genres? Does it have more to do with a conflation of sexual and emotional innocence than anything else? Or do I have a total misconception of Inspies and their heroines which should be immediately rectified?

    I’m curious! Tell me things! I love being wrong, I always learn something new.

  2. YotaArmai says:

    Rose, I was wondering the same thing as I read this review. I hope someone who enjoys inspies enlightens us on whether it’s just this book or a prevalent theme.

  3. Anne says:

    I’m not a huge reader of inspies but I’ve read a few, and the heroines in those were usually pretty mature and had their head on straight.

  4. Jane says:

    I’ve read a few inspirational romances (not a huge fan but sometimes they’re nice to read), and only a couple had independent heroines, and they were women who were truly on their own, no family or anything like that. Other than that, the ones I’ve read tend to have heroines with overly involved parents, making it seem like they were somewhat younger or immature.

  5. Rose says:

    @Jane interesting, so perhaps it’s more circumstantial than anything else–if the typical heroine is written primarily in the context of her parents, she might seem younger by default.

  6. Caitlin says:

    I don’t often read inspys, being very much Not the Target Audience, but I’ve felt like some were, as Jane writes, independent heroines, while a weird number were kind of clingy and/or naive. I read Tiffany Girl—which I think a lot of people loved—and felt strongly that the heroine was essentially being brought down to size and taught that her cute little ambitions were out of place and she should go off and marry the nice man and have babies. I HATED that feeling. (The heroine is also hired as a scab, which made it even more awkward for me—like I totes get why she accepted the job but scabs bad.) But YMMV; you might read it and feel differently than I did, or not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  7. mspym says:

    As a non-American, American history-major, daughter of an Anglican minister, inspies bemuse me. They get the religion wrong for the time period! Life was pretty religious in the American West but it wasn’t the version that these books are pushing on their characters!

    Weirdly, if you want a clean, closer to accurate, historical western, Louis L’Amour is your guy. Just don’t tell the dudes they are reading romances.

  8. Hope says:

    “Weirdly, if you want a clean, closer to accurate, historical western, Louis L’Amour is your guy. Just don’t tell the dudes they are reading romances.”

    I recommend Ride the River

  9. Rose says:

    Thank you all for your replies! I never even considered that the Western/Inspie dovetail genre might have the wrong religious tone altogether–really interesting, @mspym!

    @Caitlin–I had Tiffany Girl on my list for months, finally got it, and couldn’t make it through more than a few chapters. The setting, the descriptions, all the details were gorgeous, but I couldn’t handle the characters and relationship dynamics at all. I really thought I’d love it!

  10. Christine says:

    @mspym- I think it’s actually a facet of almost all historical romance novels that they either willfully ignore the religion of the time or completely get it wrong. (The only exception I would make would probably be Carla Kelly’s books where the main characters are Mormons. I am not a Mormon and have zero knowledge about the religion apart from what I absorbed from her books- I’m just giving her the benefit of the doubt as she is a practicing Mormon and seems to do her historical research very well.)
    It seems like unless it’s an inspirational romance, no matter what time period the book is set in, the hero and heroine are “live and let live” 21st century “spiritual” type people who respect all other beliefs etc. I go along with it, like most readers, as I do with the characters always being clean and having great teeth in times when we all know that was not the case.

  11. Caitlin says:

    @Rose, I honestly had expected to like Tiffany Girl as well. 🙁 I have a background in art history, for pete’s sake. But I had to really struggle to finish it. The relationship dynamics were painful.

  12. kkw says:

    Inspirational romances aren’t my preferred subgenre, but the ones I have read, I feel like the heroines tended to be more…idk, placid. Strong silent types. Maybe the fad for New Adult has something to do with the return of the spoiled heroine. Maybe it’s just the current zeitgeist. I feel like I’m seeing more of her than I have since the 80s, which was pretty rough on heroines. Repressive times?
    Also, have to add, I just love Louis L’Amour. My dad’s old roommate had hundreds of them, and I went through them like they were candy.

  13. MirandaB says:

    They need inspie heroines like some of the Southern Baptist ladies I know. None of them take crap and quite a few own guns 🙂

    If I ever write an inspie…

  14. MirandaB says:

    Also, I was reading a book on Puritan history and one of the diaries used as a primary source talked about the author’s mother and sister killing wolves and bears, so no placid ladies there either!

  15. Rebecca says:

    Given that last year’s RITA nominations for inspirationals featured a “hero” who was a member of the SS and a heroine identified as a “Jewess” in the jacket copy, I think we’ve established that historical and religious accuracy (or even vague plausibility) is not an important feature for the target audience.

  16. Vasha says:

    Yes, it does seem that the vast majority of historical romances use one of two methods: either “affirm the religious beliefs of a certain market segment” or “mention religion as little as possible so as to hopefully not contradict anyone’s religious beliefs”. What happened to “trust that your readers can relate to and root for someone with religious beliefs different from their own”?

  17. Caitlin says:

    Courtney Milan has a believable Hindu character! He even gets an HEA. 🙂 🙂 But it’s definitely not something I run into all the time, more’s the pity.

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