Siege and Storm - Leigh Bardugo (Grisha #2).My Fair Princess - Vanessa Kelly (Improper Princes.Slightly Sinful - Mary Balogh (Bedwyn Saga #5).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. 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 is so underhanded and underlines another reason I don't really like child characters in novels. 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. Additionally, there's Sarah's use of her child as an attempt to manipulate Matt into coming back to her. 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. 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. 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. 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. But when they finally make it back to civilization, it seems like their troubles have only just begun. 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. 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. However, after reading it, I shifted it to another category I hadn't filled yet: the secret baby category. 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.

Sing My Name by Ellen O'Connell