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The Soldier's Newfound Family (Mills & Boon Love Inspired) (2012)

by Kathryn Springer(Favorite Author)

3.93 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Mills & Boon Love Inspired

series

Texas Twins

review 1: I'd just read Springer's "Tested by Fire", and absolutely LOVED it. So much so that I drove all the way to New Salem (at Halloween time, and it's skeery enough there with the witches the REST of the year!) to get six more of her books. Because in "Tested by Fire", for the first time in the history of EVER, the Bible was an intricate part of the story. Verses weren't just platitudes, they were LIVED, they were woven into the characters, they meant something. And I wanted MORE.What I got was completely freakin' disappointed. There were NO verses lived and woven into the characters. The Bible wasn't an intricate part of the story... it was all 100% churchianity, instead. And worse, the story sucked.Let's start with the basics. WHO comes up with these covers? Carter has... more 'wheat blonde' hair, buzzed Marine-requisite short in the book. The weirdo on the cover has thick, non-regulation black hair. SO completely wrong, it's not funny.The we move to the story. This is book five of a series, and while some writers are able to write series in which the individual novels can stand alone, this is NOT one of them. It's a convoluted MESS of too many characters with too much back-story from too-many previous messes with too many still partially on-going situations.Basically, Carter comes home from Afghanistan to find out that his sister has a long-lost identical twin. Oh, and his brother ALSO has a long-lost identical twin. And as if that wasn't totally absurd enough, the father of the twin brothers may or may not be his father. And the mother (which is not his mother) is in a coma from some previous book (ad nauseum), so nobody knows WHAT the heck is going on. And no, the insanity doesn't stop there, because his sister's fiance is now engaged to her identical twin, and his brother is engaged and his sister is engaged and there are children in the mix that we're supposed to keep track of, on top of all of this. And the entire convoluted disaster is all happily congregated at the ranch of coma woman. R'something.But that's not the story. Oh-ho-ho, no. The story is about Savannah, who's husband knocked her up, left her a week after they got married (fast-acting sex, apparently), joined the Marines, told his buddy Carter about how wonderful his marriage was and how awesome the white picket fence would be when he gets home... only he gets dead, and Carter is supposed to go convey the dude's luvvv to his wife. Who was abandoned by him, is about to be evicted, and is REALLY jaded about men. At which point, Carter drags her back to his clustermuck at the coma-chick's ranch, to add a little more screwball to the mixed drink from hell.But THAT'S not all, either. Noooo... we have to add in a psychotic church secretary who may or may not be related to coma-chick but is hiding something (and btw, the young pastor has a thing for her), which we only find out about thru the CHURCH GOSSIP instigated by the heroines of the novel... and how deplorable is THAT? And don't forget the church fun. Because it's a COMMUNITY church (aka social hour), where we get to have basketball games in the gym, work on cars in the parking lot, have social dinners, and never ONCE actually edify a single gall-durned person. Yes, why yes, the author regressed from impressing me to being EXACTLY LIKE EVERY OTHER PLATITUDE-WEILDING, feel-good crap christianity peddler. SO disgusting.And she even threw a 'yummy' in the mix. Why not stab me with a spork! ARGH!!! And the writing... what in gawd's name! Page 166, top of the page. Rob drops out of school, gets a job cleaning buildings, goes for coffee before his shift to keep him awake to study. Wait, WHAT? If he dropped out of school and is cleaning buildings, WHY would he need coffee before his WORK shift to study? Isn't he going to, um, WORK? And isn't he no longer studying? Just BAD, BAD writing.Unbelievably, it digressed even further from that. It became farcical, and NOT in a good way. Not to mention there was NO rapport between Carter and Savannah, and the ending was left WIDE open so that the convoluted mess could be orchestrated with even more instruments of chaos. After all, we've only got six-part disharmony going on... we could add whole SECTIONS of crap to it!!(((I was really pissed off by this book.)))And what's worse? I have SIX MORE of her books sitting here, ready to go. Kill me, now. My hope is that this is a LATER work by Springer, and that she didn't labor intensively on 'Tested by Fire' (her first novel) and then immediately sink into the status quo of crap that's now 'Inspirational Fiction'. But being cynical... this probably isn't going to end well for me.
review 2: Carter is having a tough time dealing with the fact that his family has more than doubled with two sets of twins and a new mother. He promised a fellow soldier that he would tell his wife a message if he is killed so he meets Savannah. Her view of her husband and Carter's view of his buddy are not even close. She is pregnant and he convinces her to go stay at the Colby Ranch to take it easy. As he waits for Belle to wake up from her coma and his new family to make new bonds he may find a new path for his life.280 pages less

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