Spring Rain by Susan Weldon *

OMG. This was so awful I just had to read it all to believe how awful it was. Purple Prose. Cliche after cliche. Bad plot. Worse characterizations. Ghosts. OMG.

This was a story that has been written sooooo much better by Elizabeth Lowell in Only His. It's a heroine and hero drawn so much better by LaVyrle Spencer in Hummingbird. I'm sure any number of better authors have done better jobs with this subject matter.

It's almost laughable how bad it is. As I got towards the end, fully haven given up on its ever redeeming itself, I admit to skimming just to get to the last page.

It's 1872 in America. A prim, proper, Eastern virgin spinster of the advanced and decrepit age of 25 (gasp!) - a piano teacher with limited means - goes west to Denver to find her lost fiance. Ok, it's her 2nd fiance - her first one died on their wedding day. The 2nd fellow, while ok, is just someone with whom to spend her life - she doesn't really love him as she did #1. He decided to try his hand at finding gold so he could support her in style, as his own general store is just middling successful. After 1 year gone, his letters stopped and she began having nightmares of his death. At first, she sent money to friends in Denver who hired a scout to find him, but with no luck.

Now she plans to accompany the newest scout on a search so she can locate Clarence's body and put him to his final rest.

Well, who is this scout? Well, little lady, he's the roughest, the toughest, the meanest badass hunk of gorgeous man around - Reno McCord!! He bursts out of a saloon and knocks her over, taunts her a little, then proceeds to brawl his way to jail, where she finds him the next day. She tells him she's wealthy so he'll do it (why that matters, as long as she can pay her fee, I dunno.)

Then she tricks him into taking her along, lying to him that she can ride a horse. He insists she wears men's clothing - so she buys some but wears a dress on top so that he can't see her legs and ass shamefully displayed in the tight pants.

Yeah, doesn't this all sound credible enough?

So they spend the next several days traveling together, each of them switching back and forth like quicksilver from hate to lust to teasing to haughtiness and round and round they go. My head was spinning. I'm thinking to myself, the woman has never been on a horse and she can even WALK the next day? Not. But, hey, yeah, she does.

It's so over-the-top purple prose that I found myself groaning inwardly AND outwardly over and over. It's another virgin who manages to have wild monkey sex several times in one night - the first night, the next night and several more nights, including in a freezing cold waterfall (what a real man he is, no?). It's got the "I'll never marry, I can't settle down" multi-experienced man. It's got the "I'm now desperately in love with you after 1 day" virgin spinster. And to top it all off, it's also got the Secret Baby and the sudden-change-of-mind man proud of how potent he is that she's pregnant (after a couple dozen tries, at least) too. I just finished it so I could put it in my Spring 2009 Challenge under the title that reminds you of Spring (not that the story has anything to do with Spring) - and as a bonus, in my New Authors 2009 and A To Z challenges too. But I don't plan to give Ms Weldon another chance because it wasn't just mediocre, it was plain awful.

Do not read this book if you are looking for a good read. That's my advice anyway. But LLB over at AAR says it's one of her favorite Westerns and gave it a fairly high rating. Just goes to show, it takes all kinds, no?