Second chance romance is one of my favorite romance tropes, and I'm always up for a cowboy romance. Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy is both of those, but it felt like this book forever to get through. The pace is incredibly slow and way over-dramatic, mostly due to page after page of the characters' inner turmoil. I can get behind some drama for the characters, but that's really all I got from this one. It was either Ty's angst about his memory, which I didn't quite understand. I mean, I get that he was upset over it, but why keep it a secret? Then we have Hannah, who went to Ty's home for one reason - to reveal something - yet, she goes days and then weeks without a word. What? Hannah's secret bothered me and honestly, it didn't do much to endear the character to me. That wasn't helped by Hannah's opinions of herself. She's almost obsessive about her looks and the fact that she was a 'rodeo queen.' The number of times that comes up in her head or out grew tedious and again, didn't help with making her likable or relatable. In the end, the drama overshadowed anything resembling a romance, and it was much harder to pick back up than it was to set aside for later. 

 Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy is an outstanding western romance by Caitlin Crews. Ms. Crews has delivered a well-written book populated with phenomenal characters. Hannah and Ty married in secret. After fighting about her getting pregnant, Ty gets stomped by a rodeo bull. Ty sends her away from his hospital bed. Hannah arrives at Ty's family ranch in Colorado looking for answers 18 months later. Hannah and Ty's story is loaded with drama, humor, sizzle and a blank memory. I enjoyed reading Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy and look forward to reading more from Caitlin Crews in the future. Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy is book 2 of the Cold River Ranch Series but can easily be read as a standalone. This is a complete book, not a cliff-hanger.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book that I received from NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

He has been riding bulls in the rodeo ever since he left home at eighteen, but Ty Everett’s last fall causes partial amnesia and his return to Cold River Ranch to figure out what comes next. She was a Rodeo Queen who gave up her crown and her innocence for Ty Everett but now Hannah Monroe wants a divorce only he can’t remember her, their secret wedding or even the son she never meant to hide from him. Even if she’s willing to start over, what will happen when the truth comes out?

This ‘Cold River Ranch’ romance is gut wrenching emotional tale that captures readers’ hearts and refuses to let go. Ty and Hannah have lots of sizzling chemistry and the beginning of their romance was a fairy tale come true but true to life the relationship hits a major obstacle and then events conspire to keep them apart. The emotions are intense and flows from the pages at high velocity as readers become caught up in this couple’s reach for happily ever after.

The pace is steady and continuously builds the suspense of this relationship and the answers to several questions. The strong, unforgettable characters engage in a game of pretend that has some very high stakes indeed with lots of feistiness and stubbornness that has sparks flying in every direction along with a complicated family dynamic between Ty and his brothers that adds to the volatile emotions of this emotionally gripping romance that readers don’t want to put down.

This was enjoyable, if a bit slow and tame in the passion category. I thought the same thing about book 1, but it didn’t stop me from reading this one because the characters and concept are strong. It did take work to read, but I enjoyed the characters, the emotional turmoil that Hannah had to deal with, and watching Ty learn to accept his past, move past his fears, and accept Hannah and all that she brought to him. The plot was great. The characters were good. The passion was tame, but present. And the pace of the story was a bit slow. Overall, a good read and I do look forward to Brady’s story.

Books of 1916: Part Three: Natsume Soseki and James Joyce

Light and Darkness by Natsume Soseki

This unfinished novel, which was serialized in a newspaper, was Natsume Soseki’s last work, as he died of an ulcer in 1916. As the story begins, the main character Tsuda is going to have an operation on his intestines that sounds incredibly unsound and unclean. Think of the horrible and bizarre medical care we get today and then imagine it 100 times worse! So I was really worried about what was going to happen to Tsuda and felt that he was putting his head in the sand by worrying about his money troubles and his relationship with his wife, etc. But it turned out that the book really was about those things. Tsuda’s illness and operation ended up seeming more metaphorical than an important plot point.

I’m sorry to say that I really struggled to get from one end of this book to the other. I adored Natsume Soseki’s other books Kokoro and Grass on the Wayside. They were so lovely and brilliant. But he didn’t get a chance to edit this book and get it into shape, plus it sounds like he was sick and worried the whole time he was writing it. The afterword said that some critics consider this novel a “postmodern masterpiece” precisely because it is unfinished. But it wasn’t the lack of ending that did me in, it was the whole middle of the book, which dragged and was hard for me to focus on. I liked hearing from the point of view of Tsuda’s wife, O-Nobu, except that it went on and on without resolution. I also liked seeing all the period details of Japanese life, especially now that I’ve actually been to Japan.

Tsuda was a little bit like the main character in Grass on the Wayside in that he didn’t have very good social skills and tended to say things that made people feel bad without meaning to. The story really picked up at the end, when we finally learn Tsuda’s secret, that he has never gotten over the woman he used to love, and he goes to see her in a sanatorium, sort of like the one in The Magic Mountain except Japanese of course. His pretext is that he’s recovering from the surgery and he wants to take the waters, but naturally I was wondering if his pretext would turn out to be the truth and he would never leave. This was the section that I enjoyed the most but of course it came to an abrupt end.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

When I think of James Joyce, I always think of three people in my life who felt very strongly about him. First was my mother, who was a big James Joyce fan and talked to me a lot about him. Second, a boyfriend I had who was also a big Joyce fan, and we used to read bits of Stephen Hero and Ulysses out loud to each other. Third, my wife Aine, who had been forced to read some Joyce in secondary school in County Clare and absolutely hated him, and all other Irish writers she read in school (except Oscar Wilde.) She said they were all pretentious wankers. Early on, I had to work hard to convince her that James Joyce was not a Protestant, as she had lumped him together in her mind with Synge, Yeats, Shaw etc. In fact, just now when I read her this paragraph to see if she endorsed my characterization of her views, I had to persuade her once again that Joyce was not Anglo-Irish.

I read Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man in 2002, sure that I was going to love it as much as I loved everything else I’d read by Joyce. And indeed I was hooked by the opening page (“When you wet the bed, first it is warm and then it gets cold.”) I loved reading about the childhood of this sensitive boy Stephen Dedalus, and how his family argued at the dinner table about Parnell, and all about the scary priests who ran everything. But then I got to the part where Stephen starts going to prostitutes at around the age of fifteen, and I was completely bewildered and grossed out. Then he catches religion and becomes devout. Then he starts rabbiting on about art and aestheticism.

I had utterly lost sympathy with the protagonist and the author. Not only that, this Stephen Dedalus character began to remind me incredibly strongly of the Joyce-worshipping boyfriend, whom I had just broken up with weeks earlier. They were both totally pretentious and couldn’t keep it in their pants! (This is the same boyfriend who would get me so angry, the one I mentioned earlier in my review of These Twain. He’s certainly getting a harsh edit in these book reviews. Who knew he was so inextricably linked to 1916? He did have many good qualities, which were not at the forefront of my mind when read Portrait of the Artist.)

I ended up despising this novel. I bet if I re-read it now having had more life experience, I would have a more gentle and forgiving eye, but I probably never will. (Also, what kind of person likes Stephen Hero but not this one, when Stephen Hero is just an earlier draft of the same book? I think it’s pretty clear that the problem was mainly me, or mainly the ex-boyfriend.) I do get another chance to give James Joyce a fair shake in 1918 with his play Exiles.

I inherited my mom’s copy of this novel. It’s all marked up with notes, including D.H. Lawrence’s assessment of Joyce—“too terribly would-be and done-on-purpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life”—to which I say, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Much more magically, this copy contains photographs of me and my mom and Aine. Look at how happy we all were back then! These were from my birthday, in 2010 or even earlier.