The Accidental Bride

The Accidental Bride
by Christina Skye
Rating: 2 of 5 stars

My Review:
This was somewhat different than I was expecting, but started out rather compelling just the same. I had a little trouble with all the different names and time line jumps that the books starts out with, but I got it straightened out in my head after not too long.

The sense of place in this book was really good. I liked the author's descriptions of the setting and felt most of the interactions between characters were authentic and compelling. I got into this book pretty easily and looked forward to each day when I had some time to read. I felt like the characters often monologued in unrealistic ways, but most of the time that was easy to overlook. I found out later that this is not the first book in the series so some of my confusion might be cleared up if I read these books in order.

Jilly is a restaurant owner and chef. Her one passion is cooking. But when she has some heart problems she's told to cut back. Her friends send her on vacation (but trick her by saying it's cooking classes) to help her relax. She gets involved in the town of Lost Creek and is almost indispensable to them, in the process of worming her way into Walker's heart.

Jilly had this almost preternatural ability to read people, but she can't read Walker. I think there was also some sense that she could share his dreams later. It was an odd combination of almost supernatural and not. I couldn't tell if the book was trying to go somewhere with that because it's never mentioned outside these strange occurrences (that seem to be important somehow). I was left adrift wondering why it felt so important but was just dropped.

Walker and his dog Winslow are great characters in the book. They have a great relationship together and the time that Walker and Jilly spend together is most special because Winslow is around. It made both of these characters more real to see them interacting with Winslow. I didn't feel like Walker grew in a believable way. He was very reserved and taciturn at the beginning of the book, even though Jilly has the magical ability to get him to open up. But by the end of the book, he was monologuing to the two women that he thinks might be Jilly's friends about his relationship with Jilly. I didn't find that believable at all, along with some of the preachy monologue from Jilly's friends themselves. People just don't talk like that and if they do, you really just want to slap them.

There was no sex in this book. Some heavy petting, but things didn't go further than that. I was rather surprised about that because of how long the book was. Not that you can't have a book without the sex, I know a lot of authors write those books really well, but I ended this book feeling like the hero and heroine didn't really spend all that much time together.

This book felt super long and I ended it feeling like nothing was actually solved. Jilly had some heart episodes, but they never gave her a definitive reason for them and she's made no connection about why she gets them each time. We know a couple things that Jilly decides to cut out of her life but we never find out what she'll actually keep doing. She has so many things that she's capable of (that never seem to impact her heart condition) and you read each thing that she gets involved in and go “oohh, that's going to be a part of what her life will look like”, but it never panned out into anything. Maybe it is one of those things that these issues don't resolve themselves until the whole series is over.

I ended up feeling rather disappointed with this book. Maybe over the entire series these issues get resolved more to my liking, but I don't think I can get over the disappointment to read the other books. I had to force myself to read the last 20-30 pages just because I couldn't leave the book that close to the end. But by that point I was pretty sure it couldn't work out in a believable way. So it doesn't get a completely bad grade because I did enjoy most of the reading. But I can't get away from how unsettled everything felt when I left that world.