Customer Reviews

Conor's Way

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Conor's Way is a wonderful read. It's a romance novel, but it is also the
story of a man coming to terms with his own past and learning to look beyond it.
After refusing to go down deliberately in a fight, prizefighter Conor Brannigan is
beaten severely and left in the middle of the road, where stubborn, proud Olivia
Maitland rescues hyim and takes him in, nursing him back to health. During that time,
Conor finds his soul being healed by Olivia and her three adopted daughters, and
Conor learns, too, of Olivia's own pain.
This book really worked for me. Tyhe characters don't get into stupid fights. They
talk to each other, and their misunderstandings are genuine.
The author also draws her other characters well, and makes the small Louisiana town
where the story is set come alive for me.
Very highly recommended!

This is my favorite kind of love story. It's the story of a tortured man who's lost his belief in love, a woman who's fighting to save her family, and a turbulent time in history. It is about the making a of family, the making of a couple, and the redemption of a man. It was a truly remarkable book.

Set after the Civil War, this book tells the story of a woman trying to hold onto her land from opportunistic carpetbaggers while raising 3 adopted daughters. She comes across a wounded man on the road and takes him home to nurse him back to health.

Conor Branigan is an immigrant from Ireland. He has survived watching his family starve to death, horrific torture in prison, and innumerable other atrocities. He is afraid of love and commitment, choosing traveling the circuit as a boxer in order to survive. Gradually his body begins to heal, but it's the healing of his heart that is the true magic of this book.

This book won the prestigious RITA award. It was well deserved. The writing in this book is amazing. The author uses the technique of flashbacks to help us understand Conor and his behavior. I loved the pacing and felt the author did an incredible job at switching between past and present. I usually prefer books without children, but the children in this book were absolutely necessary for the healing that Conor needed to experience. They were a delight and excellent secondary characters who added depth to the story line.

I recommend this book with no hesitation other than it's out of print, hard to find, and expensive to buy. If you can find it....it's definitely a keeper!

This book is multifaceted. It's very difficult to be concise about the plot because it deals with 2 major historical tragedies....the irish rebellion in the 1840's and the american civil war in the 1860's. Our hero, connor, is a product of Ireland and suffers deeply from the trauma of that conflict still going on to some extent in northern ireland at the time this book was written. Olivia, is dealing with post civil war
life and the evil of carpetbaggers laid on top of the trauma of the war itself. These are 2 very deep and emotional eras. While Connor is doing the boxing circuit in america trying to outrun his nightmares, olivia has adopted her best friends 3 orphaned daughters and is trying to save her run down plantation without money and without any help. Enter Connor who having won a fight that he was told to lose is beat up and left to die on the road to olivia's peachtree plantation. She finds him and nurses him back to health against her better judgment....dealing with his nightmares, his swearing and his tormented soul. The 3 girls are absolute joys. They add so much to the story as only life seen through the eyes of children can do. How their innocence wraps around connor's heart is so real you can feel it.I would not say this book is about saving peachtree plantation. This book is about that special something in people that makes them get up and keep trying when life is unbearable. And about how 2 very different people can help each other heal. It is the evolution from hatred and misery to finding hope, love and peace. I didn't rate this book a 5, although for the research alone guhrke should get a 6* rating because I don't like books that use flashbacks. I find it too distracting. It works in this story but it just isn't my thing. Incredible job, LG. Looking forward to other books by you.

I am usually very wary and skeptical about reading "Irish" characters in novels - sometimes we are portrayed like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Far and Away with dreadful Irish accents and sayings (Hollywood portrayal of the Irish like leprechauns in Darby O'Gill and the Little People - cringeworthy) and the fact that this book was only 99 cents had me between two minds whether to buy it or not - but I did and I am very glad I did. The story is very well written and like another reviewer said, I am not a big fan of flashback stories either but we had to have these in order to understand Conor. The history was very well researched and brought back to me my history lessons during my school years. Made me want to revisit the history books again and catch up on bits I had forgotten. Yes, Conor uses bad language but I think most Irish people do - I know it comes automatically to me sometimes whether I like it or not. My only gripe was that some of the Gaelic/Gaeilge was incorrect - wrong accents on letters etc. but that is only because I know the language - could have been a problem scanning the book for KINDLE or something like that - apart from that I would highly recommend this book even if you want to find about a bit of Irish history also. She had all the Irish expressions correct, even the "cup of tay" (think I will have one now actually) Must check out some more of this author's work.

When I finished this book I felt kind of disappointed. It is a good story that is drawn out in several places.

Conor is his own man, yet he continually appears a bit wishy washy...'I am going to leave--No, I am going to stay--I will stay till peach harvest is done then I will leave.' When this back & forth thinking started, I started skimming the pages to get past it.

I felt that the story was lacking in passion between Conor and Olivia. The two bedroom scenes were short and just not too exciting in my opinion.

As I stated above, the story is there and is good, but a bit dry and drawn out at times. I wish there had been more emotion/passion between the characters.

What is a hero? How does it feel to be hailed as a hero, and know, bitterly, that it's all a lie, that your so-called finest hour is actually the source of your deepest shame?

Our hero, Conor Branigan, has seen everyone and everything that he ever loved ruthlessly destroyed. A true survivor, believes himself to be a wicked wicked man, unworthy of admiration, unworthy of love. And then he meets someone...

What a wonderful book this is! The characters, even the minor players, fairly crackle with life. They seem real, their actions plausible. The plot (well-described by other reviewers) is solid - no silly pettiness or faux-drama for our protagonists.

I spent the day with my nose buried in this book when I should have been doing the laundry and mowing the lawn. I couldn't put it down.

5 stars!

This was a well written engaging book that I really enjoyed. I bought it online and then once I got it saw the cover. Good thing as I would not have bought this book with that cheeze ball cover. But I am glad that I did because I liked this novel and had a hard time putting it down. Very well defined characters, realistic dialogue and overall a very strong story.

This is an early HR by Guhrke but it's so very well written and polished that I find it even better than some of her later work, and I've read lots of, maybe most of, Guhrke's paperback romances. Her later HRs take place mostly in England. Her earlier ones are, for the most part, I believe, in 1800s U.S.

In the 1870s heroine Olivia is raising the 3 orphaned daughters of a friend all on her own, living on what was formerly a cotton plantation in Louisiana, but now converted, after the Civil War, into mostly a peach orchard. She is struggling to make ends meet and needs help, since her only hired hand, former slave Nat, has recently died.

Hero Conor, formerly of Ireland, is now in the U.S. traveling around making a scrabbling living by participating in boxing matches. He has a past full of troubling times in Ireland, having lost all his loved ones either to the Great Potato Famine or to British occupiers' violence. He himself joined the Irish rebellion and was captured and tortured for some years by the British. Finally released from prison, he is a bitter and tortured soul, and the flashbacks to his Irish past are excellently done and very moving.

Conor lost everyone he loved and now believes he is better off without anyone since the pain of again losing anyone dear to him is almost unbearable. So he keeps himself closed off to the possibility of love and does not wish to settle down anywhere. If he keeps moving around, he will not learn to like, much less love, anyone. Guhrke has given Conor an excellent, complex character. He may be bitter and withdrawn, but he is admirable and honorable underneath that gruff exterior.

Olivia is a lovely character too but not as interesting as Conor. She is perhaps just a little too sweet, perfect and noble for my taste but it works well in this story and she does not annoy in her nobility. Her relationship to her adopted daughters is well drawn and the two youngest girls are, let's face it, adorable in their interactions with Conor. This is another first for me, really liking having kids in starring roles in a romance. I often find them annoying but not here. They're very important to the healing of Conor's psyche.

There's a bad guy here who wants to buy Olivia's land to build a railroad running through there. It's the same bad guy who has Conor beaten up very badly at the beginning of the story and left for dead. Olivia finds Conor, takes care of him until he heals and the rest is for you to read and enjoy because it's a very beautiful and touching love story. Lots of interesting secondary characters and, don't forget, besides the love story there's also the drama of saving Olivia's land from the bad guys.

In the begining, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I read the description for this book. In the end, I found it an extremely enjoyable read - heartfelt. I hated to see it end. Satisfied, it just made me want to read more by this creative author.

This is a must read for romance readers. Slightly different than the usual romances you get. A well written story about two people who have lost almost everything in their lives who find each other. A moving account of the lives of the Irish during that terrible part of their history with the famine and the treatment of the British. I liked the way the author showed us this using flashbacks through nightmares that Conor would have. The romance and sex scenes were well written and passionate but not over the top. The sex was not the main point in this book. It was about two people coming to terms with their past and starting to trust someone in their future.