Book #42: Counting the Cost (Whitney Book 22)

Title: Counting the Cost
Author: Liz Adair

I know you're not supposed to judge a book from its cover, but since starting to read the Whitney Award nominees, I know that I've been doing just that. I look at the artwork, the fonts, and the quotes on the back cover. I look at the font size of the text and the quality of the paper. If the paper is rough and the cover artwork is cheesy, I tend to conclude that the book will be bad. Reading the first few chapters of Counting the Cost, I expected it to be bad. So I was surprised when it turned out to be, gosh, pretty darn good!

Hank Benham is a cowboy in his late twenties who has already been on the range in New Mexico and Arizona for more than half his life. He's solid and dependable-- the kind of man who will be a ranch foreman in a few more years. Ruth Reynolds, an Eastern socialite, arrives on the ranch with her abusive husband, who has been sent to the desert to push pencils. Ruth takes an immediate shine to Hank, and within a few months, the husband is dead, and Hank and Ruth are together, living in a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. But love and passion can only sustain itself for so long, and pretty soon Hank and Ruth have to figure out how to sustain a marriage of opposites.

Wow, I loved this book. The characters were so rich and complicated, and the book (once again, my genre issues come through) was more than just a romance where the couple gets married at the end and lives happily ever after. Instead, it was the story of a marriage of opposites attracted, of a couple who has to compromise their personal dreams for the good of the relationship. I know relationships like this. I've seen close at hand examples of women who haven't been happy with the way their husbands provide, and do their best to let the men know it. I've seen men who have given up the things they're passionate about to make a little extra money for the family.

My main criticism of the novel is that in the last third of the book, Hank seems a little too saintly and Ruth a little too devilish. The characters are complicated in the beginning, and come back to those honest and complicated roots in the end, but Adair tends to draw them a bit more broadly for a while. But that's a small price to pay for a book that makes the New Mexico desert feel real, with characters (even the supporting ones) who jump off the page, with lyrical and beautiful writing.

The book needs a cover that is worthy of what's inside.