This book was a roller coaster and not one I loved.
CONTAINS SPOILERS
There were parts of this novel that were sweet, but also some really unpleasant parts (including a sexual assault and a near-sexual assault). Also a disturbing cult and children starving to death in an area that seemed filled with animals and foraging opportunities and not experiencing a drought. I feel like I must have missed why no one was eating?
I thought the topic of Cussy as a blue person was going to be really interesting. However, the story was sick and sad, and the romance itself was a little too contrived for me.
I really questioned the relationships in this story, particularly the main character Cussy’s ongoing relationship with her father after he essentially sex trafficked her. So I don’t know. Plus at the end, you find out that the man she’s in life-long love with has been secretly asking for her hand in marriage and her dad’s been refusing for, literally, zero reason (especially considering the psycho he deliberately married her off to). So I’m gonna go ahead and officially hate her dad, despite the fact that we are clearly supposed to love him and pity him because he’s sick. Nope, bye, dad character.
The handsome-hero-who-loves-the-protag-despite-her-rejection-from-society trope wasn’t what I wanted from this book. I think I didn’t know it was a romance and was expecting more of a story of female empowerment than wedding bells. And for a romance, the HEA was super wimpy because their life is terrible. Ter-ri-ble. So — with historical fiction — I feel like either you gotta go romance and give me an HEA or you gotta go female empowerment and let the dude die so she’s the noble solo hero/cowboy. Otherwise, just write someone’s actual story and tell us the true facts. Since this wasn’t based on anyone’s actual life, all the personal story twists just struck me as inauthentic — of course the doctor is an abusive psycho, of course the preacher is an abusive psycho, too, of course the new husband (who is also the preacher’s brother) is ALSO an abusive psycho, of course the librarian is DEFINITELY a verbally abusive psycho…
Not my favorite. Obviously I’m in the minority because this book has won like a hundred awards. So you’ll probably like it and I’m wrong. :)
