Wild Flower

TEST

From the first page, Wild Flower by Cheryl Anne Porter is a mess of melodrama and stilted writing. It’s fraught with awkward descriptive phrasing, which is wasted on boring characters who don’t deserve the effort. They all act so erratically that characterization is either non-existent, or contradicts itself every few pages. It got so bad that at one point it seemed that the hero and heroine would never get together, and I was actually relieved! I honestly wished the book would end righ there, but sadly, they made up.

The book starts out with the heroine, an illegitimate half-breed Cherokee named Taylor, sitting in a jail cell in the Oklahoma Territory Cherokee Nation, awaiting her scheduled hanging on the morrow. She has been framed for murder by her good-for-nothing outlaw lover, whom she fully believes will return to break her out – and whom she is willing to die for anyway. This guy apparently has no good traits, which is something everyone can see except her, and we are never told what she sees in him (in fact, she forgets him after chapter one and only thinks of him briefly, once, in chapter ten). Enter the heroine’s uncle and childhood friends, who break her out and leave written proof of her innocence. One would think they would simply give the documents to the authorities but they decide that’s a little too easy. Instead they hold the guard at gunpoint and break her out, which gives the guard an opportunity to offer up a dire curse regarding the death of loved ones, and the warning to watch for her spirit guide. Then Taylor becomes a fugitive and flees into the white man’s land.

Once she is free, Taylor seeks out her mother, who sends her off to St. Louis to find her father, even though her mother knows it will endanger her life. She arrives at her father’s house in the middle of a party celebrating her long-lost cousin’s engagement to a local politician, who just happens to have a rakish brother named Greyson. Naturally, it’s Greyson who prevents Taylor from entering the house and revealing herself to her father, who believes her long since dead. At first, Greyson wants to protect his friend from the pain of meeting this supposed daughter of his, then he deduces that because her father has been told that Taylor is dead, someone must be trying to kill her. And that is about as logical as this book gets.

Next we are treated to an overly long series of obvious hints as to what’s really going on. Though these hints are meant to be coy and enticing, they come across as irritating and overplayed. It all involves an extended game of musical parents, and a great deal of unnecessary secrecy. In addition to the other numerous clichés used in this book, Porter utilizes the troublesome plot device of setting up any number of revealing conversations – and immediately cutting away to a different scene before anything of importance can be said.

These aspects of the book would possibly be more tolerable if the reader were given any reason to care about the characters, but such is not the case. None of them has enough personality to interest the reader, and the result is a painful journey through an unnecessarily complicated and labyrinthine plot, Nearly all the secrets are revealed in the last chapter; the rest of the novel consists mostly of the aforementioned irritating teasers. There is almost no description of the relationship, and what little there is overflows with ridiculous statements beginning with words and phrases like “somehow” and “he/she couldn’t explain it but…,” as in “somehow he knew she belonged with him” or “she couldn’t explain it, but she knew she could trust him.”

As a book, this is an extremely poor specimen; as a romance, it is essentially a non-entity. Skip it and pick up just about anything else. It almost has to be better than this.

Reviewed by Heidi Haglin

Grade: F

Book Type: 

Sensuality: Subtle

Review Date: 30/03/01

Publication Date: 2001

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Recent Comments …

  1. excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.

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