B+

Wild Rain

Content warning: Spring’s backstory contains abuse, including sexual exploitation, and Garrett is a former slave and child soldier. Both characters face racism, and this is a major plot point.

Wild Rain is a lovely, tender romance between Spring, a horse-rancher living in Wyoming, and Garrett, a reporter for a Black newspaper who has travelled out West to interview Spring’s brother. Spring is independent, prickly, and extremely competent, and Garrett is charmed by her almost from the first moment when he meets her – which happens when she rescues him after he falls off his horse during a blizzard.

I enjoyed this story a lot. It contains many of the elements that feel like a traditional Western to me – scenes of blizzards and horse-breaking, confrontations in the local saloon, slick shysters from out East come to take advantage of the locals – but the central characters buck the stereotypes in numerous ways. It’s Garrett who is the gentle, softly-spoken, bookish one, the good listener, the fish out of water, and Spring who is the hot-tempered cowboy with the rakehell past, who tames wild horses and carries a gun that she is not afraid to use. I liked that Garrett is not portrayed as weak, even though Spring is more physically competent than he is. In fact, his respect for and acceptance of Spring is a sign of his strength and confidence in himself. I also liked how absolutely good-hearted Garrett was. You just knew from the start that Spring was safe with Garrett on every level – there wasn’t the slightest trace of macho bullshit about him.

There were some fascinating family dynamics here, too. Spring’s background is pretty harrowing, and I liked that it was resolved satisfactorily, but not simplistically. The layers in her relationship with her brother were particularly well done. And I liked the way we saw what was driving Garrett’s father’s ambitions for his children, and the way he was portrayed as being both highly sympathetic and also wrong. Families are not always easy!

Most of the conflict in this book came from outside the relationship. Spring and Garrett got onto the same page pretty quickly and stayed there, though it took a while for Spring to extend her full trust to Garrett. For me, this actually worked really well, because the external threat was pretty horrific, and flagged quite early in the story. I think if Spring and Garrett hadn’t had so much tenderness and respect between them so early, it would have been hard to bear the anticipation of that threat.

Overall, Wild Rain was a little more angsty than I normally prefer. The threat that looms over Spring through the story adds a significant amount of dread and tension, and can make for some tense reading, but the sweetness of the relationship between Spring and Garrett balanced that somewhat. It was also refreshing to read a Western-set romance with Black and Native American characters living side by side with their White neighbours – perhaps not always in harmony (and never without an awareness of race), but as a community nonetheless.

– Catherine Heloise

The second novel in USA Today bestselling author Beverly Jenkins’ compelling new Women Who Dare series follows a female rancher in Wyoming after the Civil War.

A reporter has come to Wyoming to do a story on doctors for his Black newspaper back east. He thinks Colton Lee will be an interesting subject…until he meets Colton’s sister, Spring. She runs her own ranch, wears denim pants instead of dresses, and is the most fascinating woman he’s ever met.

But Spring, who has overcome a raucous and scandalous past, isn’t looking for, nor does she want, love. As their attraction grows, will their differences come between them or unite them for an everlasting love?