Musings
I found Nellie by Cynthia Woolf, quite by accident when browsing Amazon for books that offered the audio narration for,. The book description intrigued me since I usually enjoy mailorder bride stories, I'm very glad I found this book,
Nellie is a war widow, living on the charity from her late husband's parents, Tired of their controlling ways, she answers an ad for mailorder brides, willing to travel to San Francisco, When she is presented with a candidate looking for a bride, she gratefully accepts,
When she arrives in San Francisco and meets Blake Malone, a saloon owner, she is immediately smitten and agrees to marry him the next morning, deciding there was no reason to wait.
While she soon finds out Blake is not only kind and considerate, he loves her children and accepts them as his own, Her heart aches for her husband's love, but he lets her know that he will never love her, even though he likes and respects her,
Can Nellie accept this loveless marriage Will Blake realize that whether he wants it or not, his heart belongs to his wife
Nellie's character is easy to like.
Ms. Woolf made sure I connected with her from the very beginning, She is a fiercely protective mother and willing to sacrifice everything for her children, She has a kind and generous heart, which comes out over and over again in this story,
I fell in love with Blake's character quickly, He is so caring and loving toward Nellie and especially her daughter Violet, He shows a great deal of patience with her son as well, While he may make his money running a saloon and turns a blind eye to what the dance hall girls do on the side, he is still honest in all his business dealings.
The fear he has of loving tore at my heart, I could feel his confusion and pain,
I listened to the audio and loved the narration, Lia Frederick does an incredible job with the male characters, She is able to make them sound very masculine, which is rare, She also gives each character a distinct voice, making it easy to become enmeshed in the story, I will definitely look for other books with her as the narrator!
If you are looking for a story that has a great romance, with a good deal of action and suspense, then you will want to read Nellie.
This is the first in a series, and I can't wait to read the next book, Happy Reading!
This mail order bride story is an erotic western historical romance, I enjoyed the character development and interplay between Nellie, her two children, and Blake, I thought they were all very likeable, Blake is a saloon owner and he sends for a mail order bride who is widowed with children because he wants to gain some respectability, At first he sees this as a business arrangement, Both Nellie or Blake struggle with admitting they have fallen in love with each other, and I did find this frustrating,
There was a lot I liked about this story, While predictable the mystery element was still well done, Some of the dialogue seemed too modern and it pulled me out of the story, Also, it could use another round of proofreading as there were numerous typos throughout, Still, I am looking forward to reading more stories by this author,
sitelinkTOUR PAGE Beautiful cover but white bread substance, Emotionally detached. I got this for free through Bookbub, com and I thought why not, it's free, But the dialogue was stilted, Sometimes I wasn't even sure which character was speaking, The descriptions when there were any were flat, boring, juvenile, Then the sex scenes that just seem thrown in for decoration, And the sex descriptions were bad, Things like "man rods" and "love nubs", really Just made me laugh, Not a great book. Although I will say this, it's a good first draft of a book, The story line is interesting: widow becomes a mail order bride to support her two children and moves to San Francisco to marry a dashingly handsome saloon owner who is trying to class up his business.
That part is good. Rewrite and edit the book, and you may have a pretty decent romance novel, Poorly written and needs editing, N is Nellie.
D is for Dreadful,
Clunky writing, ridiculous situations, and poor writing, Loved it!
What happens when a mail order bride gets much more than she bargained for, which is that someone is out to get her When Nellie Wallace agrees to become Blake Malone's mail order bride, being a target of someone's evil was not part of the bargain.
But even so, what begins with her marriage to Blake, a man she doesn't even know, blossoms into her falling in love with him, Blake, on the other hand, loves that he has a ready made family, which will help him in his business dealings, but, love No way! Not a part of the deal and not going to happen, or is it And what of the threats against Nellie He promises to protect her and their family, but the only reason he is following through with that is that Blake never breaks a promise.
But is that truly the only reason
Cynthia Woolf's writing is new to me, but I will definitely be looking to read more of her work, I thoroughly enjoyed Nellie! It was funny, romantic, and suspenseful, which is my favorite combination, Loved it!
Steam factor:,/
I was given a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, All opinions and viewpoints are my own, my cheese fix Stars
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I don't know what it is about Mrs Cynthia Woolf's books but they are like a drug to me.
She has a general plot formula that she follows in every book of hers that I have read, Still I can't help myself, I just gotta get my hands on her books, I know that the hero will be really sweet and great in bed, He will treat heroine well, but will tell her that he can't love her, I know that towards the end he will realize he is in love with her but was too scared to tell her, He almost always figures it out or tells her after she is almost killed, I also know that someone is always coming after the heroineof the time to try and kill her, I also know there will be a pregnancy, I know they will be on the cheesy side but the second I am craving a mushy mail order bride book I go to Cynthia Woolf, She is my fluffy cheese fix,
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Now I will say I have a fair number of friends that don't care for her books, and the common thing they tell me they don't like is the errors.
Grammar, typos, wrong name, etc so if errors are a pet peeve for you don't read these books, Errors don't bug me so I'm good, I guess to me I know what I am getting with CW's book and I like what I get almost every time, They are my safe, easy going fluff read, If you would like to try some of her books and see if they are addictive to you too she has free ones on Amazon all the time, This one was free! So you can try her out without losing any money if you don't like, : Easy and cheesy. I liked the story and the characters, Nellie is a widow with cruel in laws, So, the only thing she can think to do to escape is become a mail order bride, She finds a man who will accept her and her children and he lives across the country from her in laws, Blake is a good man and immediately falls in love with her children, It seems to take longer for him to love Nellie, He is willing to take care of her and her children, but he vows never to love anyone, But, Nellie gets under his skin and he can't help but love her, They would have a good life if it wasn't for an old lover who doesn't want to let him go, It puts Nellie's life in danger and Blake will do anything to keep her safe, Nellie Wallace is a young widow with two children, In post civilwar New York, the men are scarce and none want the burden of a wife with children, Her dead husband's family is wealthy, and cruel, Desperate to escape their influence, and eager for a home, a husband, and a stable life for her children, Nellie decides to make a new life in San Francisco as a mail order bride.
Saloon owner Blake Malone is a bachelor and likes it that way, He worked hard for everything he has, but the San Francisco City Council wont approve his plans to build a family emporium unless he is a family man himself, The solution A mail order bride from New York who will bring him a readymade family, stability, and the council's approval,
Blake expects his future wife to care for his home and, other than helping him impress the city council, to stay out of his business, He expects life as usual, What he gets is an unexpected desire to win Nellie's heart, a dangerous threat to his new bride, and a rich benefactor determined to steal his new family out from under him.
Blake believed his battle for success a hard one, But he will discover that the battle to win Nellie's heart and keep his family safe is going to take everything he's got,
What a great book, Nellie needs to do something soon, she is a widow withsmall children getting by with the help of her in laws, in New York, She needs to get out and becoming a mail order bride is her way out, Fortunately for her, Blake his looking for a ready made family to secure his new business in San Francisco, So she accepts and it takes themmonths by sea to get there, Nellie knows that he owns a saloon, but he accepts her, the children and her friend and nanny, Bertha, with no problem, The problem is a jealous ex girlfriend and the fear Nellie has of the marriage bed, Can see conquer both and find true love Interesting storyline and location of San Francisco in, FreeMail Order Bride
sitelink amazon. com/NellieTheBrid I quite enjoyed this book it is a lightreading novel, Nellie is a widow with two adorable children that goes to a mailorder bride match maker and finds a husband in San Francisco, The story has one or two plot twists and a bit of suspense, In the whole it was nice historical romance which I enjoyed, REVIEW UP
"The worst crime you can commit is telling the audience something they already know, " Aaron Sorkin
Sorry for the dramatic quote, But the man ain't lying, And this book is perfect example of why,
I was initially going to give thisbut the poor editing amp weak writing made it nearly impossible for me to overlook, Overall this lacked depth of any kind, I mean if you are looking for an easy read with not much thought put into it then sure, But actual development and common sense Completely thrown out the window here,
The editing is so poor with typos, grammar mistakes and repeated lines, And the characters are so underdeveloped and wooden that it came off like a very roughst draft that nobody bothered to clean up or develop more, Which is a bummer since the idea behind the story had potential, I usually enjoy mailorder bride stories but things immediately went all helter skelter when the author decided
to go the meddlingrd party route, But more on that in a bit,
The writing is flat out terrible, This story read more like a script because of it, Dialogue and actions just bounce between characters like a ping pong with strange disjointed/flat reactions or inconsistent stilted dialogue, The scene where it's revealed that the heroine is pregnant for instance was so comically bad and robotically awkward:
Heroine vomits,
Nellie: "Congratulations you're gonna be a daddy! Come let's tell the kids"
Everything is so static and onedimensional that it's almost hilarious, There is no gradual build up in any part of this story, The contradictions also made for a jumbled confusing hot mess, You have the characters embarrassingly contradicting themselves all the time or stating things readers already know about like it's brand new information, The hero explicitly telling his mistress to wait for him after bringing his new bride home, then later on throughout the story insisting over and over and over again that he never promised his mistress anything and she misunderstood.
crickets Uh . ok. Mistake or not, it just managed to make him come off looking like a lying ass, You told your wife that you "changed your mind" after bringing her home, but that's the same time your mistress confronted you, AFTER YOU BROUGHT YOUR WIFE HOME,
The heroine confesses ILY to the hero first but later on is all nervous saying she was scared to tell him how she felt and didn't say anything because she was waiting until he confessed his feelings first.
WTF So on and so on, the story is riddled with glaring inconsistencies that are so distracting,
I also felt the author took a lot of stupid liberties with her characters to push a thin transparent plot along, The insufferable scorned ex out to get the heroine was deployed here but in a very sloppy obvious as shit way, It was so obvious that it was laughable, like I killed someone and I will definitely kill you too verbal threat and then proceeding to push the heroine in front of a carriage.
But ohmergawd gasp! Whoever could have pushed her!
Naturally the heroine tries to tell the hero her suspicions that someone pushed her and she knows its his stanky ass crushedvelvetwearing former paramour.
But of course he needs to deploy the Patronizing Moron card, acting like its all in her head and his obsessive ex would never do that cause he "knows her better than that".
And why it took her eons to tell her husband that his poor innocent ex verbally threatened to kill her I still don't understand.
I seriously questioned the whole point of this story at this point, I just mentally checked out and filed this book under 'oh fuck no' category when the hero kept insisting and defending his mistress's innocence over his own wife,
Yeah . no thanks. The author tried to create angst and tension out of thin air over something so stupid, When you have your characters distrusting their partners forof the story over obvious foiled characters, then you may as well not even bother,
Why Cynthia Wolf thought writing her leading man questioning his heroine at every turn for some dusty side chick and thinking its passable as romantic angst is beyond me.
There is literally nothing romantic about this scenario, Its insulting and just mind numbing, And in the end made the hero unredeemable and unlikable, .
Take Nellie (The Brides Of San Francisco, #1) Edited By Cynthia Woolf Expressed As E-Text
Cynthia Woolf