Danni Roan, $2.99, ISBN 979-8201375379
Historical Romance, 2021
The heroine of Danni Roan’s Fanny is the sister of the heroine of the previous entry in the author’s Brides of Needful Texas series.
Fanny Fortuna—I’m pretty sure there is a joke in there somewhere—is bookish and quirky. This is because she talks to her pile of books and her cats, despite being from all appearances hot and perfectly capable of conversing with other human beings. She’s just quirky, alright?
This is perhaps the most sane reason as to why she, when she finds a drunken man trying to break into Adele’s saloon, the same place where she and her other sister are staying at, she decides that she won’t turn him in to the sheriff. No, he must stay close to her and do whatever she tells him to if he wants her to keep quiet!
Now, that may seem like a prelude to some pornographic episode, but be rest assured that the author has not lost her way. This is still a wholesome story in a goody-goody series, so our heroine is just being a good Samaritan.
Of course, it’s fortunate that Jude Cane is not a homicidal fiend, or else someone’s going to be in for a whole lot of hurt. No, he’s a cute fellow that is down on his luck as well as deep in his cups, and he’s a good man, people, he really is.
Fanny cut her eyes to the cowpuncher, feeling a quiver in her belly as she realized that like one of her daring subjects in a book, she could do some good right here in Needful. As a moral compass, she could set this way-fairing stranger back on the straight and narrow.
People, don’t do this at home. Real life isn’t as simple as Fanny would like you all to believe.
I’ve mentioned before that the author’s past stories can be light on conflict. Here, Jude’s past catches up with him, leading to the obligatory scuffle with some bad guys, but there is a similar lack of conflict when it comes to Jude’s “reformation”.
What reformation? That guy is made out clearly from the start that he’s a good fellow that can’t catch a break, so it’s not like there is any deep angst or moral conflict happening in his heart and soul.
Meanwhile, Fanny is naïve to a horrific degree, letting Jude all kinds of freedom to do whatever he wants while at the same time she’s not certain whether he’d even behave around her. The only reason she’s not raped and left for dead is because the hero is a nice guy. If he’s a monster, this story would quickly come to a tragic end.
Thus, I have a hard time warming up to a story that has the heroine behaving like a wide-eyed imbecile and is somehow rewarded for never having to grow up, learn, or experience any other kind of emotional development. She’s the kind to always need someone to watch over her, and I can only imagine how she would survive if she managed to outlive everyone else in her family. Not very well, very likely.
Fanny isn’t a badly written read, but then again, there are so many other entries in this series that are just as readable. There’s no reason for me to recommend this one over those, therefore. This one also has the added bonus of a heroine that has eaten too many slices of the simpleton cake, and no amount of attempts to disguise Fanny’s dingbat nature under some “quirky” façade can hide that.
In other words, this is one story that requires the reader to have either a huge suspension of disbelief or a willingness on the reader’s part to embrace Fanny’s nature as something wholesome in order to enjoy it. I guess it should be obvious by now that I’m not that reader!
