Customer Reviews

Virgin River (Virgin River, Book 1)

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mel Monroe came to Virgin River to escape. As a nurse and midwife, Mel has high expectations when she leaves L.A. Arriving on a stormy night, Virgin River is what she least expects. The cabin promised to her, rent free for a year, is a dump. The town doctor whom she was told was in desperate need of help wants nothing to do with her. Determined to leave the following day, Mel feels dejected and is unsure of where to go from there.

Jack Sheridan, owner of the only bar in Virgin River feels an immediate attraction to Mel. Seeing her sad eyes, Jack feels an almost compelling need to take care of her. For Jack, that is something that has never happened to him before. When Mel finds a baby on the doorstep the day she leaves, she knows that she can't leave quite yet. Before long, Jack finds himself falling in love with a woman who is determined to leave.

This is an emotion packed book that will make you laugh and make you cry. Mel's plight comes right off the pages and you can't help but love her. Her confusion over her feelings for Jack tear her (and will tear the reader) in two. Jack and Mel come together, two people who never expected to find what they found. Jack never thought he could feel a permanent attachment to a woman. Mel didn't think that she could ever love again after losing her husband. The secondary characters enrich the story. Virgin River is a town the reader can't help but love and will want to return to again and again.

Nurse Practitioner and Midwife, Mel Monroe, leaves the fast pace of Los Angeles hospitals and crime behind. Widowed 9 months ago, she can't face the pitying looks of her colleagues anymore and feels she needs a drastic change in order to heal.

Accepting an offer as an assistant to a Doctor in a picturesque little town in the mountains, she sells her house and most of everything in it, packs a few clothing items and heads to Virgin River.

When Mel arrives, she finds that the pictures she was sent are not quite representative of the town or her house as it looks today. Stepping out of her element was difficult for her and to arrive to find her house in such horrible condition only makes Mel realize she has made a huge mistake. She stays the night with the intention of heading out the very next morning. But when she discovers a baby abandoned on a doorstep, she decides to stay a little longer.

When town bar/restaurant owner, Jack, fixes up her place, she decides to stay even longer. Jack becomes her best friend and she starts feeling things for him she never thought she'd feel again.

I dove into this book with gusto after an Amazon friend recommended it so highly. She was right, it is great and I am rushing to finish this review so I can hurry and order book two, Shelter Mountain (Virgin River Trilogy, Book 2). This would easily have been a 5 star book to me as the characters are colorful and wonderful, the setting unique and beautiful, and the storyline engaging and fun. I would have rated it 5 stars had it not been for some very awkward dialogue and a scene at the end that was way too over the top for me.

The side characters are just as interesting as the main ones and I can't wait to read more about this mountain town. There is so much going on with Mel and we get to watch her resolve her past, live in the present, and make steps towards a promising future. Touching and entertaining. Enjoy.

Cherise Everhard, July 2008

I am usually the type of romance reader who likes instant gratification with the stories I choose. If a relationship hasn't started really moving by the 5th chapter I'm done. With this book our couple doesn't really get into anything more than basic friendship with some attraction on both their parts until, like half way thru and I found myself amazed that I wasn't bored with that, let alone that I couldn't put the book down! The characters in this book are so colorful and the healing process that our heroine goes thru following her husbands death isn't so sappy or weepy as to make you want to skip pages. She's so real and 3 dimensional that I feel like I've met her as a real person. That is such an amazing accomplishment for the author b/c I feel that is a really difficult thing to do with characters. Her relationship with the elderly Doc felt so genuine and at the same time, laugh out loud, and so did the development of her relationship with Jack. I can't wait to read the next one and then for the 3rd to be released!

*sigh* I feel like the grump lurking in the corner, but I did not like this book. Which is shocking! This book has an extremely high average and every Goodreads friend I have to date has given it at least a 4 star grade. It must have something going for it to have so many fans, but I just can't see it. :\

This was supposed to be a modern book, but it felt oddly dated. The heroine Mel, talks about Starbucks and $300 highlights so I know it's modern, but it also had a weirdly old school vibe going for it. Maybe it's the small town vibe the author wanted to portray? The hero--who was in the marines and came from California--says stuff like "fanny" and has the good ol' boy vibe going for him. It just felt like some odd time warp. It was like picking up Mackenzie's Mountain again.

Before I get into the characters and the plot I have to admit that this author's writing style annoyed me. She is a very big 'teller' instead of a 'shower.' She has a very distancing technique that made it hard for me to care about her characters. Third person past tense is my favorite style to read, but here the author killed it. There was no sense of immersion into the characters. Even though I was reading from Mel's point of view I never felt like I was reading about how her character would really think. The author had a very heavy hand in the narration and that's just not my preferred style.

One of my biggest complaints about small town stories are the wacky townspeople and zany situations they get into. I would have killed for some of that here. These people were incredibly bland to read about. They had nothing to make them unique or interesting so they all kind of blurred together. I know they were just background characters, but Mel interacted with them enough that they should have had some development going on. Just something to change the 'voice' of the characters so they actually felt different from each other!

For the most part I felt bored by the book. I kept going with it because so many of my friends liked it. I was determined to discover the magic. Then I was too far along to not finish it. I made myself continue because I knew if I set the book down there was a very large chance that I would never pick it up again. It wasn't that it was so bad that it made me hate it, I was just bored. I found the story bland and tedious to read. I have never been so aware of a page count in my life.

But I did eventually get irritated. Mel was a hard character for me to like. I thought her grief was well done--not too melodramatic, very compelling for its simplicity--but there should have been more time before she started a relationship. Up until 50 pages from the end Mel still considered herself someone else's wife. I can understand, but it did not make for a good romance. I felt really bad for Jack. She was honest with him from the start about having nothing to give him, but he was willing to accept the crumbs. They made good friends, but I didn't feel a connection on Mel's part beyond being a welcome physical release. Jack was the quintessential 'friends with benefits' relationship. Poor guy should have wised up and hooked up with someone who actually wanted to be with him.

Mel didn't make me irritated until closer to the end. In the beginning her narrative was sort of preachy about the beauty of childbirth and also about her anti-gun stance. But I just rolled my eyes and moved on. But then she turned into an idiot!!!

***SPOILER***
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She is a MIDWIFE and NURSE and she had sex multiple times without a condom. It wouldn't have been so glaring if it weren't for her job and the fact that such a big deal was made out of getting a 16 year old boy to use condoms with his girlfriend. What kind of retard doesn't practice what they preach???

After having sex multiple times the hero and heroine finally discuss protection methods and the possibility of STD's. Oh sure, it's a lot of help after the fact! Also, Jack volunteers to have a blood test to prove he's clean but Mel doesn't have one too. That's incredibly stupid. Just because someone only has one partner for years, it doesn't mean they can't have an STD too. Also, when Jack gives Mel the results she won't read them because she "trusts" him. What exactly was the point of making him have the test if she wasn't even going to look at them?

I started getting a bad vibe about the blatant condomless sex and it turned out to be right. Mel and her husband tried and tried to have a baby and couldn't. But one time with Jack and she's knocked up? Oh, please. I am tired of that stupid trope. Plus, I honestly don't think she would have ever really forced herself to connect with Jack if it wasn't for the baby. That's just sad for him.

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Because of these issues I don't think I'll continue with the series. If it had just been the characters or plot I would have tried again, but since I don't like her writing style I don't see me having different results with another book. Too bad too, because I was pretty curious about Preacher.

You'd better love babies if you read this book, and you'd better love them a lot.

Me? I don't care for them much, but figured - based on all the five star reviews - that even though the leading lady was a midwife, the story wouldn't be swamped in childbirth.

How very wrong I was.

I thought I would be reading a contemporary romance. I thought this romance would be a simple, easy read. Definitely not anything groundbreaking, but I'd hoped for something a little memorable, a little moving. This is not my favourite genre by a long shot (I like my romance with a bit of action in it), but I'm trying out a whole lot of genres, and this series was getting rave fan reviews.

It certainly read as a `women's book'. I cannot imagine any man in their right mind enjoying this book, but it would be the kind of thing I might find in my eighty-six year old grandmother's house.

Instead of a romance, what I got was something pretty close to a childbirth manual. Just about every woman we meet - of every age - is having a baby. Some have already had five, six or more babies. And then we have a `heroine' who goes around town delivering all of these babies. There are far too many details about breastfeeding and what happens during doctor's appointments and things like that. We meet a multitude of characters, and a lot of nice men, but all anybody - including the men - can talk about or be happy about are...you guessed it, babies!

There's not a whole lot of room for the romance, and this is a terrible pity because with the leading characters' backgrounds, this could have been a very emotional romance. I would have loved to read a book that kept more of a focus on Melinda and Jack and the way they overcame the grief in their pasts. Instead the story kind of meandered across a great length of time, showing us snippets that left me feeling short-changed.

Another problem I have is with some of the old-fashioned attitudes expressed. For example, when the men get together and have a couple of drinks at Christmas or a time like that (while the women sit around breastfeeding and gushing about pregnancy). Instead of - oh, I don't know - joining their husbands for a celebratory drink, they are furious with them and kick them out of bed! Honestly, what's with all these miserable, nagging wives? There's nothing wrong with what happened, and there's nothing wrong with people having fun.

I think Robyn Carr has a knack for creating believable characters and I did get through this book in a day. I have - on a crazy whim - purchased all of the books in this series, and in the connecting series, and I intend to read them. I have read excerpts from the later books, and am interested enough to continue, though I am well aware the author has a thing for reproduction that I simply cannot understand.

I sincerely hope the later books, which focus on different characters, take the series in a different direction.

My preferred emotions include excitement, passion, surprise, and humor. The emotions this book elicits are grief, sadness, comfort, warmth, pleasant romantic feelings, friendship feelings, and some oohs and aahs when babies are born. It feels more like a human relationships story than a romance novel, but there is a strong romance. There is a lot of time spent on various characters in the community which is interesting. The two main characters are grieving for people who died in the past. Jack grieves for fellow marines who died in battle. Mel grieves for her husband who was murdered in a convenience store robbery. Much of the story is about Mel's grief. She finally is able to move beyond it and love someone else by the end of the book. Reading this is like spending some pleasant time in a community. I'm sure there are many readers who would enjoy this stroll, but it is not my preferred kind of book.

Story Brief:
Mel is a nurse/midwife, whose husband was killed a year earlier. She wants a change from Los Angeles violence. She sells everything and travels to a remote small town (600 people) in the California mountains. Jack retired from the marines and runs the only restaurant/bar in town.

CAUTION SPOILERS:
Jack is 40 and has never wanted to marry. When he sees Mel, he is immediately attracted to her. She plans to stay only a few days to watch over an abandoned baby. While she is there and without her knowledge, Jack spends time, energy and money to fix up a cabin for her to live in. It was one way to tempt her to stay. I liked that part of the story.

I enjoyed Jack's patience and attempts to win her love throughout the story. I also enjoyed the scene near the end with Calvin holding a knife to Mel's throat, and Jack coming to the rescue.

Story length: 378 pages. Sexual language: none/mild. Number of sex scenes: 4. Length of sex scenes: 3 scenes (2 pages each) 1 scene (5.5 pages). Setting: current day Virgin River a small town in the California mountains. Copyright: 2007. Genre: human relationships fiction and contemporary romance.

The Virgin River Series:

Virgin River

Shelter Mountain

Whispering Rock

A Virgin River Christmas (Nov 2008)


So many things were great about this book. It's been a long time since I've read a contemporary romance that occurred in a simple and natural environment. The country setting of Virgin River was utterly romantic on it's own. The people of the town were easy going, friendly, unspoiled, and welcoming. Everyone lended a hand when needed. Doctor appointments were paid for with jars of canned fruit. Births took place without modern medical machines or medicines. No cell phones. No shopping malls, traffic, Starbucks, etc... Virgin River has the feel of Walnut Grove, with modern twists. When a nurse from L.A. finds herself in this town, she thinks moving there was a huge mistake. She can't get away fast enough. After six months, she can't image leaving.

The hero was strong and heroic, but not arrogant. The heroine was intelligent and professional, yet she didn't have an attitude when people offered her help or protection. Both leading characters had good hearts. Watching them fall in love was endearing.


Melinda (Mel) Monroe is a nurse practitioner/ midwife from Los Angeles. When her husband was killed, she had to leave the city and find peace. Nearly a year after his death, she sells everything, quits her job at a major downtown hospital, and takes a position as a nurse/ midwife in a tiny mountain town called Virgin River. When she arrives, nothing is what she was expecting. After spending one night, she gets in her car to drive away for good. As she is leaving, she is flagged down by a town resident. He has found a newborn girl that was left in a basket on the town doctor's door step. Mel can't leave until she knows the baby has a home and family.

The longer Mel stays in Virgin River, the more involved she becomes with the town residents. Many women are grateful she is there to deliver their babies. Jack, the owner of the town bar/ restaurant is grateful she is there because she is smart and beautiful. A sworn bachelor and ex- marine, he finds himself making changes to his lifestyle in hopes of winning her heart. Mel finds she can't resist Jack's giving and unselfish soul. Feelings of guilt for her dead husband keep Mel from giving her heart completely. Jack is willing to spend his life loving her through thick and thin, grateful just to be with her, even if she never gets over the loss of her husband. What he doesn't realize is that her guilt is over knowing that her love for Jack is more powerful than anything she felt for her husband. It will take a miracle to break through Mel's protective barriers. Jack will be the one to make it happen.

Drug dealers have been using the mountain forest to grow their "herbs". One of the growers is out of control. He wants drugs from the Virgin River medical clinic. When Mel refuses to provide them, he becomes desperate. Taking Mel hostage in the clinic was a grave mistake. The grower doesn't know that he is threatening the very heart of an ex- marine. Virgin River may not have a sheriff, but Mel has a powerful hero of her own.


Want to read more of the Virgin River series? Here are the next two books. (Amazon has them listed as a "trilogy", but there are more books coming in the series.):

Shelter Mountain (Virgin River Trilogy, Book 2)

Whispering Rock (Virgin River Trilogy, Book 3)


If you enjoy romance with a simple country environmant, try these historical westerns:

Jodi Thomas's Texan Series:

The Texan's Wager

When a Texan Gambles

A Texan's Luck

The Texan's Reward


Heather Graham's Civil War Trilogy:

One Wore Blue

And One Wore Gray

And One Rode West

Melinda Monroe heads to Virgin River in order to escape the loss of her husband and to find a place where she can learn to be Mel again. Not a widow, not a wife, but Mel. Her journey to Virgin River didn't exactly turn out the way she envisioned it, but sometimes it's the surprises that make all the difference.

Most of my friends hyped up this book, so I put it on my TBR challenge in order to force myself to read it because for whatever reason I kept putting it off. So as February began, I curled up with my Kindle copy of Virgin River only to discover, I don't like the heroine. How can this be? It doesn't seem fair that yet another book that everyone raves about has me wondering why. Melinda is very emotionally unaware of herself which is a huge character flaw and one particular plot element that I don't like in my books. However, I will say she grew on me as time passed, but my first impression wasn't a positive one and I know that it influenced how I read this book. I will say though that I LOVED Jack Sheridan. He's definitely one of those characters that will make my top 20 list of favorite heroes in literature. How can I feel so differently about these 2 characters and still end up enjoying the story being told on their behalf? The answer is simple, what Melinda lacked, Jack made up for in spades. Plus Carr wrote amazing secondary characters that I hope I get to stay in touch with through further books in the series.

There were elements in the story where I found myself scratching my head and trying to understand the choices the characters made, and why the author would choose certain story arcs. In VIRGIN RIVER there is one such element that I still can't quite come to grips with and I actually find that I am annoyed about it more than I anticipated.

Overall VIRGIN RIVER was a success, I can't say that it was exceptional, but it was pretty good. It was a bit predictable, but comforting in it's predictability. I look forward to visiting Virgin River again soon.

A fantastic story with colorful landscape and characters. Mel and Jack are wonderful together bringing out the best of each other. Doc is a hoot.Can't wait for the next chapter.

I could not wait to read this book based on the reviews here at Amazon. What I read was a very predictable story that I felt had been done before. Mel was a likeable heroine and so was Jack her love interest. The story I had figured out by the first few chapters. This book is easy to read and for me just light fluff. I did not love or hate it. It just is not worthy of all the 5 star reviews on Amazon.