A Shared Range

Sand cake or terrarium?

It’s a three day weekend, so I went back to the elibrary looking for a hit. The first book I downloaded was so very, very terrible that I remembered why I thought I could write things people might want to pay money for. I mean, f’fuck’s sake. I won’t even tell you what book it was, it was so terrible.

But then I found the ‘sort by most popular’ button, and things improved. I ended up with A Shared Range by Andrew Grey, which is a tale of a modern cowboy and his path to love.

It’s a romance tale, set on a ranch that is magically not struggling for income (oh fantasy versions of reality, you so cute), but where they have occasional troubles with wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone Natn’l Park. Luckily the romance was the focus of the tale, because the side-plot about the wolves got increasingly improbable as the story went on.

The main characters are fairly solid. They don’t break any molds, but they are at least moderately dimensional. The secondary characters are all pretty cookie-cutter, for their part. It didn’t really detract anything from the story, it’s just…some room for improvement.

The romance itself was fairly…well. It was pretty typical, but sweetly done, and nicely balanced with the sex and pacing and prerequisite preaching about how gays are OK! The whole book had an overly-sweet style to it, and since it was a fairly long book, that got old pretty fast (enter: skim mode!), but I think lots of people like that–and honestly, I like too-sweet stories, too, I just like them to be a bit shorter–so it’s not really even a complaint, just a fact.

All in all a decent read for a quiet Labor Day weekend.