Review: The Truth About Cowboys

The Truth About Cowboys by Lisa Renee Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not generally a fan of cowboy romances, but the description of "The Truth About Cowboys" by Lisa Renee Jones sounded so good that I decided to take a chance on it. I'm glad I did because I really enjoyed this book. I laughed out loud quite a few times, and I found Jessica, the female main character, to be relatable and very likeable. I think she and I could be friends if she were a real person.

I found Jason, the male main character, to be very likeable too. I especially appreciated how devoted he was to his grandmother and the ranch workers whom he made a part of his family. I always like to read about "curmudgeonly" heroes who soften as they fall in love, and that could certainly describe Jason in this book. He went through a lot of changes over the course of the story. In the beginning, he told Jessica point blank that he never laughed, but by the end, he laughed often, even if it was sometimes at Jessica's expense. (Poor Jessica - she was rather clumsy sometimes, and her struggles against Mother Nature were often unintentionally funny. I lost count of how many pairs of shoes she lost to the mud!)

While I found the characters to be well-developed and endearing, I did have a few questions about the plot of this book. For example, why exactly was the ranch in such bad financial shape when Jason's parents died, and why couldn't he collect on their life insurance policies? Also, I'm not sure that Jessica's initial plan for Martha's bakery was very well thought out. Martha may have been in good health for her age, but she still wasn't a young woman, and it was an awful lot to expect her to take on all of the baking for their business. It was a much better plan to sell Martha's cookie recipe and let someone else do the baking for them. Finally, it wasn't clear to me how Jason planned to make money from his baseball camps. Did he plan to host skills camps for kids or fantasy camps for adults? Either way, it seems like there would have been more up front costs and preparation involved than just building a baseball field, such as finding (or building) places for participants to stay while at the camps.

In any event, I did enjoy this story and my introduction to the town of Sweetwater, Texas. Hopefully the author plans to write more stories set there, particularly one featuring Jason's best friend, Roarke. He seemed like a pretty great guy and deserves to find a special someone of his own.

*ARC provided by the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

View all my reviews