Customer Reviews

Cowboy Trouble

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

All romances have a set formula and guaranteed happy ending. I should know, I've read a million of them. So for a contemporary romance to keep my interest, it has to have that little bit of something extra that sets it apart. I found that in Joanne Kennedy's book, Cowboy Trouble.

The first thing that made me laugh and endeared me to the book's heroine, Libby Brown, was her big fat lie about owning a ferocious guard dog. Believe me, she had handsome rancher Luke Rawlins stepping lightly on her front steps. Then her insisting that he refer to her chicken farm as a 'chicken ranch', and to her flock of chickens as a 'herd of chickens', hooked me on this feisty lady. Luke Rawlins, a tough but sensitive man, wants to make a ranchers wife out of this hard-to-coral city-girl. Add to this mix a little mystery, intrigue and danger, and you've got a read that will tickle your funny-bone and warm your heart.

i am into cowboy romance and when i saw this cover i had to give it a try. i am glad i did because this was an awesome book.

Libby Brown decides to leave her atlanta condo and move to Wyoming to raise chickens!! She meets her next door rancher neighbor Luke Rawlins and things heat up from there. She is an investigative reporter and comes across an unsolved murder. that's when the trouble starts.

there is some sex scenes but also more suspense as well. i was able to figure out who was doing the threatening!!!

i don't want to give too much away other than to tell you to buy this book. i can't wait for her next book which will be out in September!!

I have not finished the story, and I am not sure that I will. The story itself is pretty good, if a bit slow moving.

My big problem with this story is the editing. Some of the paragraphs are centered on the page while others are left justified, and some have both right and left margines even (full justification), and there are a lot of words that are split unnecessarily ("basi cally", "re peated", "sup posed", "sur prisingly", "detec tive"), not hypenated or split to go onto the next line, just split as indicated, and that is just in the first 3% of the book (up to location 173).

If this book were not free, I would definitely be returning it due to the lack of editing.

Yes, the formatting issues made it difficult to read but that's not editing - it's the process of putting the book in an e-format.

The premise is ok in this book but the characters are too stereotypical and author is way over the top in describing the characters' emotions. It seemed like there was a Volume of Homey Things Cowboys Might Say next to the author's laptop, and sayings from it were plopped in the dialogue.

Editing was very poor. The timeline is confusing - one place mentions Libby being in town two weeks, and then another only a couple of days. Cringeworthy similes and metaphors abound - here's one such sample: "suddenly the mood in the room changes as surely as if the lights had dimmed and 'Sea of Love' had swelled from the stereo."
And who uses words like "schoolmarm" and "dinette" anymore?

Didn't finish this one - skimmed through it spot checking hopefully for improvement but didn't find any. This has the potential to be a great book if the author got a good editor and did a thorough rewrite eliminating bad, bad cliches (both dialogue and characters) and straight mistakes.

Libby Brown moves from Atlanta to a small Wyoming town in order to start her own chicken ranch, but she's a journalist at heart and is determined to solve the town's one and only mystery. This book doubles as your typical romance with a bit of whodunnit thrown in. The romance side of things was fine, with Brown torn between the guy she likes and her head telling her not to get involved with anyone again. However, as a mystery this book is so predictable. It's easy to determine who the good and the bad guys are from the first few chapters, so it was a disappointment in that regard. It seems as though the author tried to keep who the real bad guy was a mystery and failed.

This was a horrible book, even for hokie romances. I could not figure out which man the heroine wanted. It was almost as if it was written by two different people. I had to force myself to finish the book and complained every time I picked it up.

There are 2 major problems with this book.
1. You know how in really good murder mysteries you have all these ideas about who might have done it, but you don't really know. Then the protagonist figures it out or it just becomes clear and you have a very satisfying "Aha" moment. This book isn't like that. You will know for certain who did it by half way through the book. It takes Libby 85% to figure it out. This means that for almost half the book you are sitting there wishing for her to get with it. Also, since she doesn't know, she jumps to a several frustrating false conclusions. I hate stupid protagonists.

2. As several other people have pointed out, this book needs a better editor or else didn't get formatted right for kindle. Either way, it is distracting to read.

This book started out well, but soon bogged down with an uneven plot line and murky characterizations. The author seemed to have trouble juggling her romance and suspense plot lines, sometimes spending a long time on one at the expense of the other, and that gave the story an unfocused feel. It didn't help that the characterizations were all over the map. The heroine, Libby, is presented as a strong, independent woman and experienced investigative journalist, but she spends an awful lot of time expecting other people to rescue her, and the solution to the "mystery" is obvious to the reader long before Libby figures it out. Not that she ever does, come to think about it--she has to have it explained to her at the end of the story. Even the hero comes across oddly. Instead of the tough, rugged cowboy the author wants to present, Luke seems indecisive and sometimes even a little dim, especially when he thinks things like, "Women were weird. Weird, but nice. They smelled good, or at least Libby did, and they felt good too, when they let you touch them." Sounds more like the reflections of a frustrated sixteen-year-old rather than a grown man, let alone a two-fisted western-romance cowboy. I also felt a little uncomfortable with the "Crazy Mike" character and how the author sometimes seemed to be looking down on the people of small-town Lackaduck. There wasn't much emotion in the story--I didn't particularly care about the romance between Luke and Libby--and the characters seemed to change their minds and their feelings about each other from one page to the next. And as far as the mystery, it was obvious early on who the villain really was, and the author often undercut her suspense scenes with silly humor. Overall, a disappointing effort, and the numerous formatting errors in the text were very distracting.

First I have to get the fact that the editing was pretty bad in the sense of the formatting and by that I mean that there were many random words that were split apart such as "com bined" but if you get past that it was an enjoyable read.This book has cowboy romance and mystery combined into one. The characters we're easy to like but a little flat. The mystery part was interesting but a little easy to figure out. I honestly enjoyed this book and read it to the finish which I tend to not do. If you are looking for a cute and easy read with some western flare then this one is for you.

I downloaded this book (free version) because living in Wyoming, I love cowboys as much as the next girl. Maybe I didn't read the description or maybe it didn't say, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it takes place in this great state! Anyway, I really liked this book - lots of twists and turns and kept me guessing through most of it. The characters of Libby Brown is someone I'd like to be - strong, independent, with a touch of vulnerability.

The only flaws were all the breaks in the words and the weird formatting that would make some paragraphs centered instead of fully justified. However, since this is the first book I've seen this way on my Kindle and I wasn't sure if it had to do with my having the text size larger than a normal book (this is only the 3rd book I've read on my Kindle so far), I put up with it thinking that is the way it was supposed to be. Now that I've read other reviews and other people are having this same problem, I guess that's just a quirk of the book. It's a shame to give this book less than 5 stars since it's not the author's fault this book isn't formatted correctly. Hopefully it will get fixed in the future.