Western Dreams
Becky Barker

Sweet, sensual, second-chance contemporary western romance. Currently free on Amazon.

Blurb:

A fun, sexy second chance romance. Bree Conley is back at the Blackstone ranch and Reece Blackstone is at the end of his rope. Maybe he loved her once but that’s in the past, and now she’s a total distraction. How can he get any work done when Bree’s so beautiful, so sassy and so tempting?

Bree has no intention of rekindling their romance even though he’s a perfect specimen of drool-worthy male. She has new dreams to fulfill, which includes turning the neighboring ranch into a wildlife sanctuary. Maybe, if he’s lucky, she’ll take Reece for a walk on the wild side…

This is sweet, sensual, and emotional rather than erotic. There is only one real sex scene. It’s about two people’s insecurities and not communicating the truth until it’s almost too late. I liked it and would give it four stars if the grammar and formatting weren’t so terrible. The same issues that were in the first book from the 80’s are still here.

Sort of camera obscura descriptions in the sex scenes. Language isn’t “flowery” but along those lines without being over the top. It is much more subtle.

3rd person past tense from both Bree and Reece. Head-hopping within the same chapter or sections.

There are many extra spaces at the start of paragraphs, extra spaces or tabs between words, and weird unintended carriage return (starts a new paragraph) in the middle of sentences. Beyond that, I found 23 errors.

130 pages.

Currently free on Amazon – June 2021.

Captured By A Cowboy
Becky Barker

Note: this would be 4 stars if it were ever properly edited!

Contemporary western romance that has aged well since 1987 but needs an editor

Blurb:

Raquel was never sure why she surrendered to a total stranger. Naive impulse, primal instinct or feminine intuition? By morning she was no longer a truck stop waitress but a woman on the way to an isolated Wyoming ranch with Holt Tyler — and he wanted to know all the secrets she’d guarded so carefully these past months.

Was he kidnapping her for his own selfish reasons or trying to rescue her from a deplorable situation? Did he really want to protect her or just take advantage of her? Had she fled a wealthy, powerful father only to fall into the arms of a passionate, possessive stranger? Time would tell how much of her heart had been captured by a cowboy. This is a very sensual romance set on an isolated Wyoming ranch.

Captured By A Cowboy was originally published in 1987. It has aged very well! The story is still relevant. It’s sweet, emotional, hot, and entertaining. It is fast paced and would be more so if it weren’t for all the errors. I loved the characters, Raquel’s growth, and Holt’s decision to let her go find her independence, trusting that she would return.

Unfortunately, this has clearly been digitized using text recognition, and it has not been proofread since. If you’ve been reading my reviews, you know that my brain edits what I read even when I’m only trying to read for pleasure. There was hardly a page that I did not make a correction on, and many needed several corrections. I love that we can get old books as ebooks now. But if you are going to charge for it, you must engage the services of a proofreader. And it clearly needed a better editor to begin with as all the errors cannot be blamed on a computer!

3rd person past tense. It has a head-hopping problem, jumping from Raquel to Holt and even to some secondary characters occasionally.

There were too many errors to count or even detail their types. It was hugely distracting from the story! It’s a testament to how good the story is that I made it to the end without giving up. I’d like to read more of Becky Barker’s novels, but I don’t think I can take it right away. She is still writing, so I hope her recent novels don’t have so many errors! – Update: The latest novel Barker has written does have loads of errors.