Shelter Mountain

Shelter Mountain
Robyn Carr

I am not usually a women’s fiction reader, but occasionally a book or series will come along that just grabs me. The Virgin River series by Robyn Carr has grabbed me from the first book.

Yes, there is romance, but not the bodice ripping kind that sets my teeth on edge, just a nice meet a new person fall in love kind of romance that builds around the storyline and does not seem to jump out of nowhere catching you completely off guard.

However, like most romances, the male characters are a bit farfetched. I have never personally met a burley mountain man that melts like whipped cream in hot chocolate. Not to say that they do not exist, but that is definitely a woman’s creation.

What I do like about Robyn Carr’s books is that the end of one flows effortlessly into the next. The next story seems to take up where the previous one ended without a glitch or a feel that you need to play catch up. New characters are introduced in a subtle way that makes you wonder, “What is their story”, and low and behold, that is the path you are taken down.

Shelter Mountain begins when late one evening Preacher is closing the bar and a young mother and her child arrive scared and bruised. John “Preacher” Middleton has not had much experience with women, but he knows pain when he sees it and he knows that this young woman is in trouble and if she will let him, Paige Lassiter has found the man that will protect her from an abusive husband and a life on the run.

I like where Robyn Carr said that she doesn’t have villains, she has issues, and that is why she writes women’s fiction. She is drawn to capable female characters. That is what I like too. There are no victims in her books, there are just women that find themselves in difficult situation and they find, with the help of friends and community, a way through to the other side.