Books & Spoons Review for RODEO FATHER by Mary Sullivan

TEMPTED BY A FAMILY

Travis Read never wanted to settle down anywhere with anyone. He's in Rodeo, Montana, just long enough to fix up a house for his sister and he'll be on his way. Then he meets Rachel McGuire. Beautiful and kind and with magnetic whiskey-colored eyesRachel is everything that Travis could want. Except that Rachel is also very, very pregnant.

A struggling widowed mom, Rachel wants to give her family the stability she's never had. Travis dashed those hopes by buying her dream house. Okay, she can start over. But she wasn't counting on such a fierce attraction between them. And this cowboy was never meant to settle down

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I adore this story for so many reasons, but mainly because it is so true to life to many yet managed to be truly uplifting. The struggles they have are real, their life had not been easy yet they had made the most of it and generally held a positive attitude, still looking for joy and jubilee in life and saw the good in people and in the situations surrounding them. 
Rachel had Travis with the first smile. That was all it took and he started to fumble deliciously into the kinds of feelings he had been avoiding his whole life while raising his younger sister. And it didn't take much more for Rachel either even though a romance was the last thing she needed in her life right now.
Rachel's life was not only on a bumpy road, it was on a rough rugged downhill spiral. Not many things were going as she wished, planned, or hoped for. But what I liked about the story was that Travis was not put in the role of a 'savior' in Rachel's life, but that the bond between them was a give and take friendship, where they both were on an equal setting, and rewards were not counted in material goods. 
And when that friendship got to be more, it wasn't all smooth sailing there either, but it was just the kind of awkward, delicate, klutzy stumble that it often is, and it made me sigh and smile and like them even more. 
This story pulled my emotions with its engaging plot, characters that were so easy to like and relate to, life situations that many can refer to in their own life, yet the story had the kind of fairytale-like glow, serendipity that can only happen in romance novels keeping the swoon factor high, and smile on the reader's face. An inspiring and heartening tale, indeed.
~ Four Spoons with a teaspoon on the side

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ACTION LINKS

Rodeo Father at KOBO