Judith’s review of Texas Blue
Gambling man Lewton Paterson wants to marry into a respectable family. After fleecing a train ticket, Lewt makes his way to Whispering Mountain. But seducing a well-bred woman is hard, and Lewt realizes that to entice a McMurray sister, he’ll need to learn a thing or two about ranching-and love.
Folks who have been raised in relatively normal families with a modicum of parental love and support often find it difficult to understand the hunger that eats away at the insides of people who have received little if any love from a parent or caregiver. More often than not, that kind of hunger becomes a driving force that shapes not only the childhood and teen years but moves on to become a central goal during adult living. Such is the case with Lewton Paterson, a career gambler living in Colorado and a man who has hankered after a home, family, respectability, and the love of a good woman most of his life. One of his best friends is a Texas Ranger and a man who is deeply concerned about the long-term well-being of his three unmarried cousins in Texas, the McMurray sisters. As was the socially acceptable norm in that day, especially in the tough and wild outlying areas of the West, this Ranger is looking for husbands for his cousins and arranges for three financially stable men who are in the market for wives, to travel to the sisters’ ranch, stay a week, get to know the women, and perhaps out of that will come a marriage for one or all of them.
Lewton knows that his friend would never choose him. Who would want a professional gambler with no family and a very checkered past as a member of the family? Yet Lewt sees this as a prime opportunity to find a place for himself in a well-established family. His friend does not know that Lewt has been saving his money, that he is very successful at what he does, have been building up a considerable personal amount of wealth, and can easily support a wife and family. So he manages to engage one of the men in a poker game–an Easterner who has a very low opinion of women as functioning, thinking, valuable human beings, and who openly expresses the opinion that any woman who marries him is getting a prize. Lewt easily picks him clean, as they say, including his train ticket. Getting him royally drunk and sending him off in the opposite direction, Lewt boards the train for Texas and begins his adventure.
The oldest McMurray sister, Emma, has some secrets. First, she really doesn’t like men and she doesn’t want a husband. So she gets her best friend to impersonate her for a week while she portrays herself as the ranch foreman. She also has some secret from the past that is a big reason why men are just not on her personal radar screen. Lewt begins to disarm her–he doesn’t want to sit around the ranch house drinking tea, gossiping, or exchanging what he calls “parlor talk” with the ladies. No, he wants to learn something about ranching and thus, he talks Em — really Emma McMurray–to put him on a horse, let him follow her around, and put him to work on the ranch. This she finally agrees to do.
This historical romance right out of the pages of the history books is really a slice out of ranch life in the 19th century evolving territory of Texas, when law and order was spotty at best, when the Texas Rangers were most active in this post-Civil War era, and when living on the wide open spaces may sound romantic but it was a hard and dangerous life. There are a number of issues both with the sisters and their responses to the men, and with their cousin who is on a ride with the Rangers as they follow smugglers into Mexico. The reader is always waiting for “the other shoe to drop” in relation to Lewt’s presence and the fact that his friend, the Ranger, really wouldn’t be very happy to see him courting one of his cousins. Yet you can’t help liking this man as he proactively works to fill in some missing pieces in his life and to find a way to have the kind of home he never had. Emma is gritty, sassy, often unpleasant and never less that direct, a woman who knows what she loves–and that’s the ranch–and she knows what she doesn’t want–that’s a husband. She is one of those quintessential Western women who had to be independent, often had to be their own vet, human nurse or doctor, midwife, cook, housekeeper, mother, ranch hand, and on and on. In other words, they had to do it all, far more than women have to do today. No wonder they looked like 90 miles of bad road by the time they were 30.
Jodi Thomas is one of those authors that can make American history shine bright, filled with colorful characters, stories that grab the mind and emotions, and woven through it all are the facts of what really happened. She is one of a small group of women authors who have this kind of historical romance writing down to a science. Ms Thomas and her writing colleagues are the main reason I have taken a renewed interest in historical fiction that is rooted in the American history books. It’s not all shoot’em ups, or cattle rustlers, or vagrant gangs, or corrupt small town sheriffs. It is about individuals and families and those who wanted to build a longevity for themselves and those who guarded the future. Into that context she has placed this story and woven its fictional parts seamlessly into the facts of history.
This book was a joy to read and I confess I did it in one sitting. It certainly held my interest almost from the first. That’s one of the reasons I think readers will appreciate this new addition to Ms Thomas’ bookshelf of publications.
I give it a rating of 4.5 out of 5.
The Series
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This book is available from Berkley. You can buy it here
Thanks for the great review. I have this book on my tbr pile and will have to move it up closer to the top.