GRR Reviews The Crippled Bride and The Ambitious Miner by Faye Sonja

The Crippled Bride and the Ambitious Miner didn't have much of a plot. Things just happen, and the characters just feel so... passive.

Ava has a bad limp since she was 18 after a bad accident, which led to her being unmarriable. Her father was a politician, and appearance was everything. She was thirty-one when her father claimed to have caught her mother cheating, and kicked them out. Ava is unemployable with her limp, and her only way out was to mail order bride herself out West to California, where a miner, supposedly well-to-do, needed her to help the new community of Gold Creek. She can send back money for mom later. Upon arrival, the miner, Jackson, turned out to be co-founder of the town with political ambitions. However, the mine had not actually struck any gold yet. Jackson knew Ava was too good for him and the town, and worried about she is not ready for the rough life of the frontier town, esp. with that limp. Will they learn to understand each other?

This author's stories don't flow right. Things just happen, rather than being caused by character's actions and inactions. Farmer's complaint about the mine used too much water and ruined his crops was mentioned, then never again. An enemy of Jackson turned out to be stealing gold from the mine, but that's just a "sudden" deus ex machina revelation near the end. And there really wasn't much of a fight between Jackson and Ava after they acknowledged that both had lied to each other. the plot just doesn't flow.

Category: Historical Western

Primary Plot: Can a crippled woman marry a miner as a mail-order bride when the town seems ready to throw them out?

Overall Rating: 2/5

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