Title: Horses Heartaches and Hope
Author: Brooks Wright
Date: 2023
Quote: "Should've come back sooner."
When Jemma loses her parents and comes back to their ranch, she wishes she'd never left. The ranch can be made profitable enough that she doesn't need to bother with her job in the city. (Props to Wright for mentioning this extremely important factor in come-back-to-the-old-home-place stories.) She has old school friends here; she didn't have close friends in the city. And of course one of her old friends has grown up into an attractive man. Who admits, in the course of the story, that he was a pest at school because he had a crush on her. He got over his crush when Jemma went to the city, married a girl who stayed in their home town, and lost her and their baby. Now he and Jemma begin to bond because both of them feel angry at God, because of these untimely deaths.
This is a sweet romance, so you know...but, along the way, the plot takes a more suspenseful twist when men begin harassing Jemma, demanding that she sell or leave her property. Kudos to Wright for adding a real storyline to a short genre romance; I think she could have handled it better, anyway.
It's a serious issue. We as a nation have yet to recover from a time when women weren't considered competent to manage their own property. We've mandated respect for women's bank accounts but we have yet to pound into the heads of too many people, even decent people who may believe their intentions toward female land owners are good, that women have the same legal right to own land that we have to own money.
The weekend before writing this review, I aggravated a chemical reaction that I already knew was going to be nasty--and it's being nasty as I write--by commandeering someone's employers' flatphone and documenting illegal poison spraying around a mountain spring...which was done not to prevent the spring branch silting up, which has been prevented by me if at all since the guilty person acquired a claim to the spring, but purely and entirely to harm me. To my disgust, the person with the flatphone failed to provide any emotional support but went into a panic attack, yipping "Come back, let's go, let's get out of here," as I photographed the evidence of the crime. Person was obviously more afraid of the criminal than of failing to do per duty and help prosecute the crime.
We need to be saying to those who don't unequivocally support women's property rights: Have you a beard and call yourself a man?
We need to be demanding that politicians stop babbling about the so-called "right" to be done horrible wrong, through abortion, and take a firm stand in support of women's right to own real estate.
We need to be telling those who are still drivelling about "reparations" for the long-gone past that "reparations" need to be made first and foremost to women, and need to begin with all real estate being owned by women, with men as co-owners who may have a claim on profits but can't inherit land in their own right, for a few hundred years. After all, good men would not want to be seen out of their homes or job sites alone, lest they raise suspicion that they might be involved in hatecrimes against women.
Well, for a start, "reparations" to the dead being a silly idea in any case, we can begin by telling men that it's our property, private and public, and if we live on it and know what's going on they should not try to take over what we do about crimes committed on it but should follow our directions, living in fear of giving any slightest suggestion that they think their testosterone poisoning makes them more competent than we are. We can begin by reminding men that although they are more likely to have the mechanical talents to work on cars, their testeria and twitchiness keep them from being more competent even to drive cars, as a class.
Reading this novel so soon after seeing an old friend flake out on me, I wished something would happen to Tate so that Jemma would have to manage the ranch by herself for a few years before she found a husband. Oh, nothing fatal--maybe his first wife wasn't dead yet, after all? Until women have resolved serious questions about our basic civil rights, even an appealing husband can be More Of The Problem. Tate shows the right attitude but he functions, in relation to Jemma's real story, as a crutch that's not going to be available to most people in her situation and is not part of a satisfactory solution.
Fortunately or unfortunately, this novel's "story arc" follows the cheap-genre-romance timeline rather than the grand-sweeping-epic-romance timeline. Jemma solidifies her title to her own property by marrying a man. All very well for women who like men, who are of course the huge majority of all women, but it fails to make a much needed statement about women's right to own, manage, and occupy land all by ourselves.
Anyway, politics aside: sweet Christian romance, reasonably likable characters, spiritual enlightenment as a plot element. If you like a story that has those features, you'll like this book.
