Sing My Name - Ellen O'Connell

Continuing the 2017 Unapologetic Romance Readers' Reading Challenge, I picked up Sing My Name in hopes of fulling the category of a romance taking place in the antebellum, Civil War, or Reconstruction periods.  However, after reading it, I shifted it to another category I hadn't filled yet: the secret baby category.

The story here revolves around Sarah, a young woman travelling west to marry her fiance who is in the army, and Matt Slade, a man who was arrested for a murder he didn't commit.  When most of their travelling party is murdered by Comanches on the trail, Matt and Sarah escape and find themselves trying to survive in the wilds, and falling in love.  But when they finally make it back to civilization, it seems like their troubles have only just begun.

I've read another of O'Connell's books before, Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold, and I have to say I liked that better for one main reason: in Sing My Name, all of the romance happens in about the first quarter of the book.  After that, Matt and Sarah are separated for a good deal of the book, pining separately and going through separate travails, until they finally reunite but are still held apart by Matt's conviction that he's not good enough for Sarah.  Sigh.  That is my least favorite romance trope: the "I"m not good enough for you!" trope keeping the protagonists apart, rather than anything in their actual lives or environments.  O'Connell tries to throw in a few disapproving allies and townsfolk, but it's pretty clear what's keeping Matt and Sarah apart is ultimately Matt himself.  Additionally, there's Sarah's use of her child as an attempt to manipulate Matt into coming back to her.  While Sarah clearly loves her daughter and values her, she also uses her as a tool rather than as a person, leaving her raising mostly to other people except when Matt shows back up and Sarah decides to prove a point.  This is so underhanded and underlines another reason I don't really like child characters in novels.

Overall, this was an okay book.  The pacing was incredibly slow; while the beginning was good, when Sarah pretty much immediately decided she loved Matt, I knew that the remaining 75% of the book probably had unpleasantness in store, and it did indeed.  This definitely wasn't as good of a book as Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold, and if it had been the first of O'Connell's I'd read, I probably wouldn't bother with any other ones.  Sigh.

2 stars out of 5.