Cameron Hart, $2.99, ISBN 979-8223656098
Contemporary Romance, 2023

Adelyn, the heroine of Cameron Hart’s Taming Her Mountain Man, is 18.

I suppose this could be one way to attract TikTok kids to read, but it also drives home all the unfortunate stereotypes about the kind of relationships that take place in the mountainous wilderness of America. The hero Kade is far older and he calls saying over and over that Adelyn is too young, but make no mistake, this constant mention of her age and youth is actually more akin to a fetish than anything else.

Our heroine is in Yogi Bear Land to survey her inheritance from a grandmother that she has never met.

Martha, may she rest in peace, basically handed me a new life. Apparently, I was her only living relative, so I got everything. Her fully furnished log cabin up in the small mountain town of Bear’s Tooth, Montana, her life insurance money, even a freaking boat!

Why is it that I never have such generous family members? Those that never bugged me when they were alive but leave me a busload of goodies when they die? Instead, they only happen to imbeciles in romance novels like a mercy get out of jail card. Life is so unfair.

Adelyn meets Kade when she is looking for her cat in the woods and it just happens to be with Kade. By the time she meets him, she’s lost. Of course.

“Yeah, so, um, I’ll just head back home. It’s uh…” I look around but only see trees. “Well, it must be this way,” I point behind me. “That tree definitely looks familiar. I remember looking at that knot in the trunk and thinking it could be someone’s face. It looks very wise. Like it would give some good advice.”

It’s a good thing that she can impress Kade in other ways, I suppose.

Shut. Up. You. Weirdo.

“You talk to cats and trees, but not people?”

I’d be totally mortified if it weren’t for the fact that he’s smiling. Or, well, he’s trying. It’s kind of lopsided, but I find that somehow more endearing. I get the feeling I’m the only one who has seen that smile of his in a while.

“Yup, that pretty much sums me up. And explains my social skills.”

“I try not to talk at all. Including all animal and plant life.”

I’m cringing so hard by this point, I’m hurting.

Naturally, Kade has to escort her back to her cabin, because where would strong, independent women be without a brave man to lead the way? Starved to death in the woods, no doubt.

I’m not kidding about this, by the way. Our hero doesn’t just have to lead the intelligent and feisty heroine back to her home, he also helps her unpack because this brave and stunning woman is too weak to handle the moving and opening of the boxes of her things.

She also trips and falls, needing our hero to pick her up.

Thus begins a beautiful relationship in which the man is thoroughly besotted by the fact that here is such an addled and incompetent city gal that will surely not flee back to the city once she realizes that life in the wilderness isn’t as exciting as it may seem at first. Oh, and he also gets a free cabin and boat and her insurance money, so that explains why his pee-pee gets extended by an extra ten inches when he’s so excited.

While this thing isn’t that long a story, my god, it sure feels like it will never end.

So much of the story is just Adelyn giggling and acting like an incompetent rag doll while unloading her entire sad and useless past onto this guy from the very first second of their first acquaintance, that the whole thing appears designed to be a vicarious existential therapy session for a reader that is as vapid and incompetent as the heroine. 

Kade does everything for her, explaining step by step why he has to do what he does, including getting rid of the car she used to come here (don’t ask). 

Sure, this won’t be so bad had the author had Adelyn start out being out of her depths only to adapt and become more at home in her rural surroundings. Instead, the story insists that the heroine is actually very smart, without actually showing any of Adelyn’s purported smarts naturally.

When Adelyn decides that it’s time to have a fresh start, this “fresh start” means getting stuffed with mountain man meat 24/7. That’s not a bad way to live, but the heroine is still a worthless birdbrained walking vocal fry at the end of the day.

Hence, this story never delivers on any of its promises when it comes to the heroine’s brainpower or character arc.

The romance never rings real because it’s just an adult daycare for the heroine: Kade just sweeps into her life for her to natter endlessly about her life and issues while he sets about fixing up her life, and somehow they both are in love when the whole thing is more akin to Adelyn stumbling onto free babysitting and rogering 24/7 without earning any second of this.

Kade is never a real character, just a designated walking dildo and fixer-upper for the heroine.

In the end, there are rescue fantasies, and then there are just vapid stories featuring useless bimbos and the meat sticks that fix their mistakes, and this one lands squarely in the latter territory.