Danni Roan, $2.99, ISBN 979-8201121150
Historical Romance, 2021
Olga Fortuna arrived at Needful, Texas with her sisters, and now that those sisters Adele and Fanny have wedded, our heroine doesn’t feel the need to get married so quickly.
She’s a good seamstress that can make something gorgeous even on a tight budget, so perhaps she can explore a career of her own in this particular area… that is, if she can focus on that and not on the drifter Harker Stevenson.
You know how those men can be. He wants to be free to go as he pleases, and he’s feeling the urge to move on from this town after spending a year or so here. Meanwhile, she wants to settle down in town with her family and new friends. Can these two come to some kind of middle ground for a romance between them to work?
Olga is, from what I can see, the final entry in Danni Roan’s Brides of Needful Texas series, and it encapsulates the general strengths and weaknesses of the author’s past stories in the series.
On the positive side, the narrative style is clean, and the story doesn’t feel cluttered or derailed by the secondary characters taking up space in this story. Those characters are to be expected, as this is the tail end of the series and by this point, everyone sort of knows everyone else already. Here, however, they do have their place and role in the story; they aren’t here just to wave at my face and yell at me to buy their stories too.
I have a fondness of happy-go-lucky cheerful blokes, and Harker is a nice example of such a guy. He isn’t malicious or mean, just a man that prefers not to be bogged down by commitments and responsibilities, and I like that fellow.
I also like Olga. She seems like a familiar goody-goody heroine at the surface, but she’s far smarter than her sister Fanny with an occasional sense of mischief that is just too cute.
On the negative side, the author has shown in the past that she either prefers not to or isn’t very good at creating psychological and emotional conflicts, and it’s the same here. The issue here is that the central premise requires a reconciliation of two very different philosophies of life, and the author just sweeps all the work needed for this in favor of a shotgun marriage and some external drama that has nothing to do at all with the central premise.
Hence, the romance never feels fully complete. Too many issues remain unaddressed by the end of the day, so I have some serious doubts about the happy ending.
