Check another one off the NPR Summer of Love list. Texas Destiny is first in a trilogy about cowboy and rancher brothers living in an as-of-yet uncivilized West Texas. Preciously, they are named Dallas, Houston, and Austin. (“Our parents just named us after wherever they were living at the time,” Houston explains, which doesn’t alleviate my raised eyebrows considering Texas is huge, frequent travel in the Wild West is not something one does for fun in this era, and in the pre-birth control 19th century I’m asked to believe that the Leigh parents were such dedicated nomads that they conveniently only popped one out in each town? Okay.)
This is a pretty simple story and romance, and while I see why it is considered a classic, it’s maybe a bit too elementary for my taste. The protagonists have about 2 dominant personality traits each: Amelia is brave and nurturing; Houston is silent and sensitive. Amelia is a Victim of Circumstance (“The Victim of Circumstance is someone who, usually due to exigencies beyond her control, has dim prospects and has to make her own luck”) and Houston is a Protector (“The Protector is a warrior: probably taciturn, very kind, gentle, and uncommonly stalwart”). While Mrs. Julien has cleverly and eloquently laid out these characters to the T, I feel the archetype should be merely the foundation and not the entire basis of the character. In Texas Destiny, little is done to give new life to these character styles.
Here is their plug-and-play plot: Amelia, having lost home and family after the Civil War, registers in a catalog for mail-order brides and is contacted by Dallas Leigh, a cattle entrepreneur in West Texas and the two of them enter an arrangement. Due to an untimely broken leg, Dallas is unable to retrieve Amelia himself when she arrives at the Fort Worth train station from Georgia, and he sends his brother Houston to collect her. Cue road trip! By horse and wagon, naturally. As one does when they are cooped up with someone of the opposite sex for extended periods of time, Amelia and Houston end up falling in love, though both feel guilty at the thought of betraying Dallas.
If you’ve read a romance before, you can probably guess how it ends. I completely contradict myself with my thoughts on how it ended, because on the one hand, I strongly dislike angst and manufactured drama, but on the other hand, I feel that just like everything else in this story, the resolution was way too simple and tidy. Dallas basically rolls over when Houston and Amelia come clean about their love, despite his main character attributes being ambitious and proud. The previous several chapters had made it abundantly clear that having a son was as high of a priority as growing his business, and after her arrival, Amelia is literally the only woman in town. There is nothing in his characterization to indicate he would be totes cool with just giving her up, but he kinda just shrugs and says “Ok.”
In short, the book was quick, nice, warm, and fuzzy. It’s a very safe and comfortable example of the historical genre, just not very interesting.
I completely agree with the main romance being beyond basic. What really interested me was the relationship between the brothers and the few glimpses back at their war experience. The way they didn’t communicate and misinterpreted each other broke my heart. I had to go check the publishing year on this one – it was 2010. It felt like a mid-90s book to me – it could easily have been something I read 20 years ago as a teen.
You’re right — the dynamic between the brothers was absolutely the most complex and interesting part of the book.
While I loved that NPR did a big list of romance, I’ve sort of cherry-picked what I felt like reading from it, and this series didn’t appeal all that much. First of all, Lorraine Heath is very much a hit and miss author for me – she’s perfectly entertaining and her books pass the time, but they don’t stay with me, and she’s firmly in the “buy on sale if the book doesn’t look too sucky”, not pre-order or auto-buy. I also don’t really find Westerns all that interesting.
Your review was excellent, though, and I loved your paragraph about the heroes’ names. Sounds a bit far-fetched as a naming strategy, I agree.
I am also of two minds about the NPR list. The part of me who likes to be challenged is thinking I’m going to work my way through all of them, while the other thinks there is no point in reading books I would never read otherwise, when my TBR is already so long. There are pros and cons to both positions, but this probably is under the category of “would NOT have read.”
This totally sounds older than a 2010 book, but I might be tempted by it 1) as a secret (or not so secret if you’re related to me) civil war buff and 2) I’m always a sucker for a good road trip romance.
The road trip may be the main draw here, then. Or I don’t know? Depends on what you like. The Civil War does feature fairly heavily, but mostly in the way that “the atrocities of war” left Houston and Amelia with some baggage. So you get flashbacks to their darkest hours, but it’s less specific to the Civil War than just war in general, I think.