SuperWendy’s August’s TBR topic is the Backlist Banger – a book by a favourite author that has been sitting on your TBR for a long time. I have always adored Anne McAllister’s books. She has been an auto-read author for me for nearly 3 decades, and I have reviewed her books several times on my blog (sexy baklava book FTW). The book I read was first published in 2014, but first read by me this year.

Anne McAllister’s Last Year’s Bride

It’s for the ranch. It’s your duty. A man does his duty, always. His father Sam’s words were carved into Cole McCullough’s brain. His responsibilities lay with Rafter M Arrow, which had been in their family for over a hundred years. Even though they were fighting a losing battle to keep the place going.

The ranch always came first, over personal comfort, sometimes reason and definitely women. Sam had seen both his wives walk away, dismissing them as hot-house city girls who couldn’t survive the wilds of rural Montana. So how had Cole ended up making a spur-of-the-moment marriage last year in Reno to TV director Nell, who was as city as they came? Nell was prepared to give it all up to be with Cole. But he knew how it would as it had always ended before. It was time to stop living a pipe dream and sue for divorce.

But then Nell came back to Marietta with The Compatibility Game, a reality program, in which couples discovered what they were willing to do for love by living and working at Rafter M, and Cole found himself taking part too…

Keeping your marriage a secret from your families is not a favourite trope for me. Not that it doesn’t happen, it’s just that if it does happen, there are usually other family dynamics at play which forces this situation. Often there are scary control issues occurring for at least one person in the couple to necessitate keeping a marriage secret so it is hard to be on board with the romanticising and fictionalising and genrefying of this oft terrifying situation. In this book, it is not as terrible, however our hero Cole McCullough’s impossible family responsibilities keep him from laying his love out to be seen by his family so he keeps his whirlwind romance and marriage to city-girl (lol but of course) Nell Corbett who he meets in a cowboy (him) documentary she films.

Cole is a fall-on-your-own-sword kinda guy for the love of his family. A strong silent dude who suffers in silence rather than talk to the people he loves to solve his problems. So just as Cole serves Nell divorce papers, Nell turns up to his farm, choosing it to film her reality TV show which gives his ranch an injection of money. The true love and a determined woman prevails, and Cole and Nell overcome his lack of being able to prioritise his own life over his family.

I didn’t mind this story. It wasn’t my favourite of McAllister’s Cowboy series but it still resonated enough that I gave it a 3/5 star rating on my GoodReads. Not high praise but certainly a satisfying enough result for an auto-read author. From what I can tell, Anne McCallister has not published any novels in the 2020s, and I really miss her writing. It will just need to be rereads for me.

Metadata:

My metadata: category, cowboys, family dynamics, farm, loneliness, marriage in trouble saved, martyrdom for family, melodramatic, reality TV, romance, still waters run deep, trust, USA.

Library metadata: There is only a brief library record (author/title/publisher/year/some other brief specs/no subject descriptors) available for this book which was a Digital Only publication. From what I can tell, it is Anne McAllister’s first Digital Only book. I wish I could say that the Digital Only aspect for this book is why there is a limited record but Nah! I looked up other McAllister records from those the 2010s and there is nary a useful descriptor in any of the books I found. The best (worst) I found was the nauseating Man-Woman Relationships. FML. Or FMM (fuck my metadata).

LOL