Dinca’s review of The Substitute Bride by Janet Dean
Love Imspired Historical published by Harleqin 9 February 2010
This is one of the best mail-order bride stories I have read. I find the plot innovative with lots of twist and turns. Ted and Elizabeth each have a secret they don’t want to share.
Elizabeth Manning is on the run, she has promised her little brother she’d come back for him when she finds a job and a place for them to call home. Waking up at the depot where she spends the night, she spies a young woman crying. Finding she’s a frightened mail-order bride, switching
places with her is an answer to Elizabeth’s prayers. Anything is better than being payment for a gambling debt!
Becoming the mail order bride gets her a train ticket to New Harmony, Iowa. Now if she can only go through with the marrying part of the deal. Discovering her husband has a farm is promising – possible home for her little brother. At least the decision for marrying is hers and hers alone.
Ted Logan is a widower with two children. He is determined to make the farming way of life work. This is his second chance in life and he will do whatever it takes to keep his family together on the farm. With vulture in-laws breathing down his neck threatening to take his children, he decides to order a bride through the mail.
Not exactly getting what he thought he ordered, Ted comes to an uneasy agreement with Elizabeth, and visit the preacher before heading out to the ranch. They learn a lot about sharing and forgiveness and heartache while falling in love.
I enjoyed this story and would recommend it to anyone who wants a sweet love-inspired tale with a happily-ever-after ending. It is well written and a very pleasing read. Janet Dean has created another wonderful tale.
Grade: A
Summary:
Fleeing an arranged marriage, debutante Elizabeth Manning exchanges places with a mail-order bride bound for New Harmony, Iowa. Life on the frontier can’t be worse than forced wedlock to pay her father’s gambling debts. But Ted Logan’s rustic lifestyle and rambunctious children prove to be more of a challenge than Elizabeth expects. She doesn’t know how to be a mother or a wife. She doesn’t even know how to tell Ted the truth about her past–especially as her feelings for him grow. Little does she know, Ted’s hiding secrets of his own, and when their pasts collide, there’s more than one heart at stake.
Read an excerpt.
