Wyoming Bride by Joan Johnston
Mail Order Brides, Book 2
Dell
Historical
ISBN: 978-0-345-52746-2
Reviewed by Vanessa

Living in an orphanage, Hannah Wentworth felt she had no choice, but to become a mail order bride to a complete stranger. She needed to escape the abuse that went on at the orphanage and save her two sisters with her. Her new husband, Mr. McMurtry, agrees to take the three of them on, and they leave on a wagon train headed to Cheyenne. However, Hannah’s younger twin gets them all into trouble, and they are quickly left behind the train. Soon, her husband is dead. She and her sisters are attacked, and Hannah is forced to seek help when a handsome stranger happens upon Hannah who has set-out for assistance.

Flint Creed vows to marry the next woman he comes across in order to stay honorable and not pine for the woman he can’t have, his brother’s fiancée. Flint quickly proposes marriage to the beauty, but he fails to tell her that he is in love with his soon-to-be sister-in-law, and the young Hannah keeps mum about the little bundle she is soon expecting too! Their marriage will be a necessary arrangement protecting each of them from secrets that they harbor. However, as danger threatens, they soon realize there is more involved than they had counted on and neither is sure of the other.

Wyoming Bride is an engaging historical romance that had you rooting for Hannah and her younger siblings as they sought a better life for themselves. The picture that was painted of their life at the orphanage was left to my imagination as I did not read the first of this series, but it had to be awful if they were willing to risk so much in Wyoming Bride. I was told that Hannah wasn’t a selfless individual, but she seemed pretty selfless in Wyoming Bride, and I thoroughly enjoyed her attempts at making a better life for herself and her sisters.

Flint Creed was described by several other characters as a coward in Wyoming Bride, but I never felt that was thoroughly explained to the reader. I just figured it was explored more in the first book of this series and left it at that. However, I couldn’t understand how another character discovered the secret later on in Wyoming Bride. I get how Flint could think he loved his future sister-in-law, but I couldn’t understand why as he didn’t seem to truly know her, and he sure didn’t lust after her, either. Again I chalked this up as something else. Perhaps his youthfulness? They whole scenario of that group seemed a bit naïve as well, but I went with it in order to see how it would play out in Wyoming Bride.

Wyoming Bride seemed to leave some holes for me, but again I feel those would be filled in with the other books in the series. However, I just could NOT get past the feeling that Hannah was basically sloppy seconds in Wyoming Bride. It felt more like they both settled to make the best of a situation.