Always a pleasure to read Cheryl St. John – her books always leave me feeling warm and fuzzy even if they aren’t perfect.
Her Colorado Man by Cheryl St. John
(2009, 1880’s Colorado)
Grade: 4
When Mariah found herself unmarried and pregnant, she and her grandfather invented a husband who was conveniently off in Alaska. But when her “husband”, Wes Burrows, appears and wants to become a part of their family, Mariah isn’t quite sure what to do. Her son needs a father, but does she need a husband?
Cheryl St. John’s best quality is that she can take basically nice characters and still make them interesting. Mariah and Wes were both kind and loving and the story was warm and charming. The setting was interesting (a German family in 1880’s Colorado who owned a brewery) and the secondary characters all worked well with the story. The problem was that the story started to fizzle out in the middle of the book. The hero and the heroine are clearly meant for each other and we get the same scenes over and over. I think the author missed an opportunity when she glossed over the hero’s background and the heroine’s difficult past, because that might have given the book more momentum. The hero mentions his past, but we never really hear that much about it from his point of view, and the heroine’s past is kept mostly secret until almost the end. There’s a little bit more drama in the last chapters, but unfortunately, the book just didn’t live up to its potential. Good but not great.
I try not to read a book and think how I might write it differently. (There’s a reason I’m not an author!) But in this case, it seemed like the potential was there and it just didn’t quite come together.
Karen Wheless
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