After the Parade by Dorothy Garlock ****

This is book 4 in a series of which I only read books 3 & 4. This one is really unusual for romance - it's the second book about the same characters, Johnny and Kathleen Henry. At the end of book 3, With Heart, we know they will be getting married in 1938.

Now it's 7 years later, and Johnny is coming back a hero from WWII. But there's a catch - before he left, he and Kathleen had a baby girl who was born deformed and died within 48 hours. After her birth, Johnny told Kathleen he couldn't give her children and advised her to get a divorce. Then he enlisted - and the 2 didn't correspond at all during the 4 years he was overseas.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've only read one 2-book series with the same hero/heroine like that, the Marsha Canham book that takes place around the time of Culloden. (I'm not counting books like the In Death series) But the Canham book literally stops in the middle of the story and then takes up again just days later, and the 2 haven't had a falling out.

A lot of the book I was sorta torn - her writing style, perhaps meant to mimic a speaking style of the time, kept making me blink. I'm not sure how I'd describe it except to say that she always used:

"I've not got any bread"

instead of

"I haven't got any bread"

and it's such an odd way of speaking. Did people all talk like that in Oklahoma? Or is that just the author's way?? Dunno.

Also, she had more 2 dimensional bad guys, and another psycho/sicko in the mix, sorta like the previous story. I started to wonder if Kathleen was going to be Pauline in the Perils of Pauline!

Yeah, then I got to the end, and got all weepy for Johnny and Kathleen getting back together FINALLY. So I had to go and give it 4 stars.

With Heart by Dorothy Garlock ****

This book is a little different from the romance books I usually read because it's historical, set in the 1930s USA during the depression. It's actually the 3rd book in a series, but worked well enough as a stand alone in a 2-book collection.

In this one, Kathleen Dolan - a writer/journalist - moves to a small town in Oklahoma where she has invested in the small-town newspaper. She meets Johnny Henry and the two of the spend the book trying to avoid falling in love. Johnny's problems are multiple -he's a "half breed" (actually, I think he's only a quarter because when his father is revealed, I recall he was a half breed). His mother was a whore and his father just a kid sowing his wild oats, who didn't even know until many years later that he had fathered a child with this woman.

In addition to the attraction between the 2, the book has a number of other memorable characters and a scary suspense story involving the town doctor. Not real scary, and I figured the mystery out pretty early on.

I liked it pretty good, and kept reading past the end so I could learn "the rest of the story" because the second book is also different. I give it 4 stars, mainly because I did care for the characters. I didn't love it though because the bad guys were really just caricatures, not fully fleshed out human beings with faults.