Wonderful frontier life love story. A delightful dirty read about very realistic people living interesting lives. I can't wait for the next in the series.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is very well written. The characters are complex and realistic.

I received this eARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Love's Arrival is a historical romance set in 1872. Livvie is a woman who has had no luck in life with love. Bound in a loveless relationship, she is approached by a man she absolutely doesn't want to marry. She receives help from friends to move from Missouri to Colorado to start a new life. There, maybe she gets a chance to new love, if she can just allow it to happen.

Love's Arrival is a sweet love story were you really feel for the narrators. The book jumps between multiple POVS, mainly Livvie and Justus but also a few others, as well as different time periods, but always stays easy to follow. Although the book has several redeeming factors, what caused me to keep the review at three stars is mainly because the love story felt too cliché and lacked depth. Since I'm an avid reader of historical fiction, I also expected this to be more historical details about the time period. There were some accounts of slave trade and structural violence against women, but the story would've benefited from a stronger historical context.

This book suits readers of cute and simple romance more than readers of profound historical fiction.

Thank you Netgalley and High Plains Woman Press for the eARC.

This review has also been posted on my account on Goodreads.

DNF @ 55% This was Christian Fiction in Disguise, Please Label Accordingly Post-Launch

Sigh. This book wasn’t great, but there was loads of untapped potential, but unfortunately due to heavy Christian themes I could not finish. Other than that though, this book had other issues that hopefully can be chalked up to an inexperienced author.

Love’s Arrival is a debut novel for this author, so I’m going to try to make this review as constructive as possible, though it will be mostly critical. There were some good ideas here and a solid setting but it was a very rough read due to the episodic writing style and inherent lack of plot depth. Between the time jumps, the flashbacks and the 2 page long chapters, this book was choppy and hard to get immersed in. The writing is decent though and conveys a lot of feeling but the story just couldn’t be properly developed as it lacked any flow to the narrative. Whenever I started to get into a scene it would end without transitioning to the next and as a result I frequently found myself losing interest. I’d recommend the author focus on a singular time line, writing in third person pov to reduce jerky transitions and perhaps telling the backstory in a prologue or at least in a linear fashion. Because of the chosen style, the story is extremely slow to develop and the characters lack depth.
Also for a non-Christian romance, there was a HUGE AMOUNT of Christianity and Christian themes. Some Christian rhetoric is to be expected in a historical western, as likely the characters would have been church going, but the messaging in this is VERY heavy on God and using God to explain things and as a motivation for the decision making of the characters. The main theme of the story is the MCs struggle with their faith and there is lots of preaching and bible stories. This should be tagged Christian but I guess because it did have sex in it maybe it can’t be? I’m not sure of the rules but I didn’t love the heavy hand with which religion was applied to the story and would have avoided this had it been explicitly stated. I’d be less overt with the Christian normativity in future books if you are not writing Christian fiction, it’s EXTREMELY off-putting for us secular readers and it was the main theme of this book. I felt like I heard about what god thought more than the characters at times.

As for the main characters, they were difficult to root for. Both are such passive people, letting life happen to them. Olivia never says no to any man and as a result just succumbs to their advances and goes along with their wishes. I prefer strong heroines who have some grit to them. This woman is such a meek mouse, I had trouble feeling sorry for her when she was pushed around by all the men in her life.
Justus, as a hero wasn’t much better, he feels like he doesn’t deserve good things and doesn’t fight for anything he wants. How these two meek people survived in this setting is beyond me.

Furthermore, the villain arc in this story isn’t well done. There are actually two separate villains in this story, both men who want to possess the heroine, and both are just all bad and so one dimensionally evil that they could be twirling dual moustaches. This lack of nuance when writing villains causes the plot to descend into melodrama. Neither has a compelling reason to obsess over, abuse and stalk the heroine other than that she was somewhat pretty and that she thwarted them. It’s very hard to build tension in a villain story line when the villains inspire yawns and eye rolling with their lack of depth or believability. I’d recommend focusing on one single villain and make his motivations solid and fully fleshed out, because the ‘stalker who wants the heroine for his own’ is extremely overplayed in this genre.

Unfortunately I can’t say if I was happy with how this book ended because at the 40% point this went all Christian and I had to put it down. I searched all over the authors page, website, NetGalley’s description etc for an indication that I missed this being Christian but I could not, so that’s on you publisher.

CW: sexual assault, assault, prostitution, Christian themes.

This book was generously provided to me by NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

I was really hopeful for this novel. It started really good, however became very disorganized feeling. I could not finish this novel. I know it’s a debut novel and I’m hopeful for this author to improve as she goes! I would try another one of her novels!