Author: Stacy Henrie
Enjoyment Rating: **
Whitney Finalist
This book would be rated: PG
Rounding out the romance category is Stacy Henrie's Lady Outlaw. It was the last book I read in the category, and although an entertaining read, probably the weakest of the bunch.
Jennie Jones is trying to hold on to the family ranch in Central Utah, but it seems that everything is conspiring against her. Her father is dead, and she feels the burden of caring for her younger brother and her grandmother. The bank keeps changing the terms of the mortgage, decreasing the amount of time she has to pay back the loan. If she doesn't have the full amount paid in a few months, she will have to turn the ranch over. And so she does what any girl in her situation would do-- she robs stagecoach robbers.
Shortly after Jennie embarks on her life of crime, Caleb enters her life as a ranch hand. Caleb is kind and good, and still mourning the loss of his fiancee in, you guessed it, a stagecoach robbery. Caleb and Jennie fall in love, but how will Caleb respond when he learns what Jennie has been doing?
The resolution of Lady Outlaw felt awfully convenient to me-- I had a hard time believing that Caleb would forgive and forget so easily. Furthermore, some of the book seems to center on Jennie's spiritual crisis-- members of her church treated her mother unfairly and Jennie has harbored resentment. It seems that most people living in her town are part of this congregation, and the town is a central Utah town in the 1800s, but there is no mention of Mormons, which seemed odd to me.
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