This was my pick for book club to find an easy and probably humorous read for the holidays. I was not disappointed. Things I learned from this book:
1. Oregon City back in the day had a pandemic of unexpected mail order bride ordering going on.
2. No one, I repeat NO ONE, should be allowed to represent dialects and/or accents in their books except William Faulkner. My book contained a train wreck of "Irish" accent, "Louisiana" accent, "Scottish" accent, and what I could only assume was "general hick" accent. NOPE. Just tell me the character is Irish, Louisianian, etc and let me imagine that for myself.
3. This book had too many conflicts and none of them were resolved in an interesting way. The first conflict was that Our Hero was too filled with shame and guilt about something to ever marry a wonderful woman. (This is the conflict I assumed I would be dealing with for the entire book. Not unreasonable, I suppose, for a romance novel.) BUT NO. About one-third through the book, Our Heroine starts to melt through Our Hero's "black heart" (his words, not mine) and he begins to fall in love! Enter conflicts Two and Three and Four (or Two and a Half? Three and three quarters? They were all kinda the same thing?) Two tall and mysterious men enter town looking for Our Hero...are they here to cause trouble? Well, it turns out one is (the Louisianian), one isn't (the Scotsman), and then the Louisianian teams up with conflict Four, (? I think it's a conflict?) the local deputy, to cause trouble for Our Beloved Couple! But then it ends up, after dragging on for chapters about What Could the Mysterious and Likely Nefarious Purpose of These Mystery Men Be, that the Scotsman takes care of the Louisianian AND thus also the evil local deputy, so that Our Hero does not have to do anything to resolve the conflict after all! Only ONE conflict was resolved "on screen" and all the rest happened outside the written narrative.
4. Lots of cliche dialogue.
5. There was some very strange dialogue that was meant to build sexual tension between our two main characters. I just feel really confident that talking about the number of children you would like to have with your partner, while practical, is not a hot and heavy conversation.
Overall, I would consider reading another book like this again if I needed a very quick read and/or wanted something relatively mindless to pass the time at some point.