More Characters for Kaki: Book Review of Where the Horses Run

It was nice to read a Kaki Warner novel that didn’t have rape and murder in it. - I recently finished her latest, Where the Horses Run. - I guess it was because this one takes place in England rather than the wild American West. 

Where the Horses Run is part of the Heroes of Heartbreak Creek series.  The characters from Heartbreak Creek all make an appearance, even if only in the words of another character.   Ash and Maddie, the main characters from Colorado Dawn as the prime auxiliary characters in this book.  They travel to Scotland and England with Thomas Redstone, who has been an important character in all the Heartbreak Creek novels. 

Thomas is sort of Heartbreak Creek’s Mr. Spock.  never primary, always a large role and a clear outsider who’s half insider.  Thomas is a Cheyenne Indian whose grandfather was white and who sometimes serves as deputy sheriff, a very white role, but very much with his Cheyenne personality.

The Kirkwells – Ash and Maddie – also take with them a new character, Rayford Jessup, who is this book’s male love interest.  Along the way, he meets Josephine, the book’s female protagonist.  She loves horses; he’s a horse wrangler.  There you go.

Where the Horses Run is a much slower paced book than Warner’s others.  I, for one, appreciated that.  I could put it down and come ack later, but still found it enjoyable and a good read.  there were no horrible stomach knots this time and no tears. 

There also seem to be fewer lusty scenes, which is just fine by me.  Though I was disappointed by the ones that are here.  they felt like words instead of emotions.  Ruth Okediji’s descriptions of steps the World Intellectual Property Organization can take to reposition itself in Balancing Wealth and Health were more emotionally resonant than Kaki Warner’s intimate scenes in this book.  There must be other adjectives to describe nipples besides “puckered,” which isn’t a very pleasant sounding way for nipples to be – sounds course, hard and painful.  How about alert? dancing? robust? apprehensive? peaked?  I don’t know; I’m not a romance novelist.  But puckered made my nose squinch up in discomfort and distracted me from connecting with the words on the page.

Josie is a delightful character.  Strong yet feminine and although she’s got a history to make her interesting, she’s not broken and doesn’t need fixing.  Rafe is broken.  Rafe has an interesting history, too, but we never really get the whole picture.  Maybe that will come out in a future story.  Some great fan fiction could be written about his past.  There’s just enough bits and pieces given.

Thomas’s character is continuously flushed out throughout the Heartbreak Creek novels, and it works well.  Because of this, he has more depth than any other character and it’s about to pay off.  The next book will focus on him and Prudence Lincoln, the half sister of the first novel’s protagonist (Edwina Brodie in Heartbreak Creek).  I can’t wait!

 

Other Kaki Warner book posts:

1. Pieces of Sky
2. Open Country
3. Chasing the Sun
4. Heartbreak Creek
5. Colorado Dawn
6. Bride of the High Country

Runaway Brides all Found

On Sunday, I started the last book in Kaki Warner’s Runaway Brides trilogy.  On Monday, I finished it.  The final book, Bride of the High Country, is a wonderful read, back in Mrs. Warner’s original style of Heartbreak Creek and Pieces of Sky.   As you can tell, I had a hard time putting it down.

Bride of the High Country does have its sex scenes, but they’re far more romantic and less raunchy than those in Colorado Dawn.  Bride of the High Country is first and foremost a love story, and then a romance novel.  It’s also the story of strength, softening and survival.

The final novel in the Runaway Brides trilogy tells the story of Lucinda Hathaway, the New York society woman first introduced in Heartbreak Creek as a fellow train-passenger headed West with Maddie, Edwina and Pru.  The first novel was Edwina’s story; the second, Maddie’s.  Now it’s Lucinda’s turn, and the story starts back several years with Lucinda as a 12 year-old orphan in New York’s Five Points area.

Much like Jessica in Pieces of Sky, Lucinda is running from painful memories in her past.  Running towards an unknown destination that takes her to America’s post-Civil War Wild West.  Of course, one can never out-run the past and Lucinda is forced to face hers.  The story is well-told and beautiful – though I do have some qualms with the author’s decision to have Lucinda reveal her painful past to her friends on her wedding night.  She could have waited a day!

As the novel progresses from the heartbreaking beginnings in Five Points to the beautiful ending in Heartbreak Creek, it crosses over events from the other novels.  These events are often summed up quickly.  What took pages of suspense and agony in the prior novels are covered by the new main character as if they were rather inconsequential.  Having read the other novels recently, I found myself skimming these passages, “yeah, yeah, I know what happens here, let’s get back to the new story.”  Yet I can see these portions being important for keeping the three novels together as one story. 

Because the trilogy novels overlap in time somewhat, it’d be really neat to read all three of them put together into one book with the perspectives switching around.  Perhaps a bit confusing, but still neat.

Of the three Heartbreak Creek novels, Bride of the High Country is the best-written and most engaging.  It keeps the love story high, the sex scenes tasteful and the death to a minimum.  I’m glad I didn’t let my disappoint with Colorado Dawn dissuade me from reading this book.   And even though this book contains some spoilers for the other novels, I’d actually recommend reading this one first.

Now, what Kaki Warner series to explore next…

The Second Runaway Brides Novel

It’s been awhile since I finished the second book in Kaki Warner’s Runaway Brides trilogy, Colorado Dawn.  I guess what really sums up my feelings about this book is that I didn’t order the final book in the trilogy until yesterday, months after I finished Colorado Dawn.

Colorado Dawn focuses on Maddie Wallace, one of the town-ladies met on in the first novel.  She had married a Scottish officer some years ago and, felling abandoned by him, had fled Scotland for the US with a new career as a professional photographer.  Now, her husband has finally tracked her down and come after her himself.  His perspective on who abandoned who is a little different.

I had been enjoying Kaki Warner’s books as fun historical fiction with a bit of romance and adventure.  Colorado Dawn seemed to hop the fence to full-blown romance novel.  That’s not really my thing.  I just found it incredibly hard to believe that in the late 1800s, a young lady sitting at a dinner table with all her friends would have her hand under the table playing with her husband’s junk.

So, yeah, the descriptions get a lot more vivid, which sort of takes away from the rest of the story.  But, it is still neat to follow the main characters from Heartbreak Creek, and there’s still a good story in the book.  The new lover introduced in this book is straight from Scotland so it’s fun to parse through his thick accent. 

The action isn’t nearly as nail-biting as any of the other Kaki Warner books I’ve read, but that’s ok by me.  It was in some ways a nice break to be able to put the book down and go to sleep when bed time came.   We’ll see if the third book is more along the lines of the Blood Rose Trilogy or this book.

Starting a New Kaki Warner Trilogy

Another Kaki Warner book devoured in about three days.  When I get my hands on these things, I just can’t put them down.  I may be addicted.

I recently finished Heartbreak Creek, the first in her Runaway Brides series.  The four main characters of the series are introduced in this book.  What’s interesting, is that the series has four main characters, but only three books.  In some ways, this book was about two of the ladies’ stories, but only one of the stories really had an ending.  I wonder if the other lady’s story will continue through the other books.

In Heartbreak Creek, we meet a young Southern belle, widowed by the Civil War and now family- and plantation-less who decides her only escape is a new husband.  So she becomes a mail order bride for a Colorado rancher looking for a sturdy farm woman to help him raise his four children.  This poor woman can’t even cook!  That provides plenty of amusement.  Lucky for everyone involved, her half-sister goes along for the ride and is an excellent cook and has many other useful skills she’s able to share.

It bothers me a bit that the character who doesn’t seem to have her own book is this half-sister, daughter of this book’s main character’s father and mammy.  She does play a very important role in this book for most of the story, but her own love life is left unresolved.  I’m hoping that’s not the case by the end of the series.

As usual, I found myself laughing frequently during the story, gripping pages tightly in nervous anticipation and fighting to put the book down at 3am when I really needed to go to sleep.  No tears this time, but that’s fine by me.

Having read all of Kaki Warner’s Blood Rose Trilogy novels, I was expecting the same sort of plot line here.  I was pleasantly surprised.  While the novel does have a big climatic life-or-death scene like her other works, it doesn’t feel as much the main focus as in her other books.  This book feels far more about the love story and the everyday hardships of throwing yourself into a completely new world.  And, the adventures aren’t just physical safety fights, especially when someone suddenly winds up with two wives!

I enjoyed this book more than the last two I’ve read – and I liked those well enough.  I don’t know that I’ll ever find any of her other works as intensely, emotionally infiltrating as Pieces of Sky, but I’ve already ordered the next in this series.

Last of the Three: Book Review of Chasing the Sun

I was finally able to read Kaki Warner’s third book in the Blood Rose Trilogy, Chasing the Sun.  This book focuses on the youngest of the three Wilkins brothers, Jack, and his love affair with a saloon singer from Canada/San Francisco.

This isn’t Warner’s best book in the series, but I still devoured it in about three days.  By the third novel, the reader is pretty familiar with the general plot lines.  Different danger, different bad guys, different lovers, same general outcome.  There’s also now so many characters – all the main characters from the first and second books plus a few more – that the protagonist characters seem to get less depth than their forerunners.

The historical setting is excellent and well-researched, as always.  This novel takes place in the 1870s, after the Panic of 1873 and after the US has stopped using silver to mint coins.  This sets a background for the Wilkins family to encounter some financial issues as their silver mines become nearly worthless and debts they incurred for investments in the mines come due.

A nice surprise and change from the other novels, Chasing the Sun starts out in San Francisco rather than on the Wilkins ranch.  Much to my delight, San Francisco is accurately depicted as a cold and grey place bustling with a wide variety of people crowded into a tiny little space.  The transfer of the main story out to the Wilknis ranch presents a nice comparison between the ranch’s wide open spaces beautiful landscape to the busy city.

My favorite part of this novel was the descriptions of Jack’s travels around the Pacific: Australia, Hawaii and other Pacific Islands.  It’s really neat to think that even nearly 150 years ago, people could still travel the world and come back to their families.

If you’ve read the other books in the Trilogy, Chasing the Sun provides a nice follow-up and a sense of closure with the characters.  If you haven’t read the other books, I’d recommend not picking this one up first.  It’s a bit difficult to understand without background from those books and contains some spoilers.

Deeper in the Blood Rose Trilogy

Man, Kaki Warner makes me want to move to New Mexico.   Her second book in the Blood Rose Trilogy, Open Country, is just as beautiful and engaging as Pieces of Sky.  

The Blood Rose Trilogy is about the Wilkins brothers, owners of a large cattle ranch in New Mexico in the second-half of the 19th century.  Open Country takes place a few years after Pieces of Sky ends and revolves around one of the younger brothers, Hank.  (The first novel is about the oldest brother, Brady.)  It’s really neat to have characters you love and know well appear again as secondary characters.  It adds depth to the novel and makes it even more enveloping.

I didn’t have the same connection to this book as I did to the first one, but I still couldn’t put it down, despite the fact that I accidentally ordered the large print version and so had a pretty heavy weight to hold up.  I devoured this novel in just three days.  Warner’s descriptions are enchanting and the dialogue quick paced. It’s hard not to fall in love with the characters as they fall in love with each other.

The book is a great love story and a decent adventure story - thankfully, with quite a bit less blood and gore than the first novel.  The only downside of Warner’s books is they make me so wistful.  It must be wonderful to be loved the way her main characters are. 

I am definitely looking forward to the last book in the trilogy!

Book Review: Pieces of Sky

I’m a sucker for historical fiction, and a nice little love story set in the wild west just after the Civil War seemed like a good escape for awhile.  Something to pick up and put down at leisure.  Boy, was I wrong, and right.

Pieces of Sky by Kaki Warner sucked me in and wouldn’t let me go.  Little did I know upon picking it up that this random novel would strike a chord deep inside me.  I really couldn’t put the book down and finished reading it in a few days.

The heroine of the novel, Jessica, is running away from pain.  Warner’s depiction is amazingly accurate.  The fear, the panic, Jessica’s attempts to bury it, her struggles to face it, everything resonates with reality and pulls the reader directly into the story.

Plus, it’s a cute love story set on a violent frontier, complete with gun battles, stagecoach robberies and stampeding cattle.  If this book were a film, it’d be one of those chick flicks you might be able to trick a guy into watching for the action scenes.  Descriptions are vivid, conversations witty and the entire book engulfing.  Normally, I send my finished novels to Mommy to read.  I’m keeping this one, sorry Mommy.

Bonus: I just realized this is the first novel in a trilogy. Guess I have a couple books to add to my reading list.