A Bride in the Bargain

While certain aspects of this book do grow repetitive, they're written in such a way that doesn't feel like the author is just copy+pasting to make the book longer (other than in one spot, Joe says the exact same sentence twice, which is weird).
I was surprised by the other reviews - I didn't realize this was supposed to be “Christian fiction”? The characters are Christians, but it's not like it's unusual for white people in 1866 to believe in God or anything. Anna (the female lead) is of course concerned with her reputation, given the time period. It would've been nice to see a bit of expansion on Joe's assurances that basically nobody cares about things like that in town. They say it a couple times but it doesn't really come up at all - the handful of female characters don't comment one way or the other, and the men are just happy that there's an attractive single woman in town, so there's really no discussion about impropriety or reputations at all beyond Joe saying that nobody cares.

This was a very quick read, and I liked that the book wasn't just one extremely long sustained misunderstanding with everything getting wrapped up 3 pages from the end. Oddly, one of the most enjoyable aspects was the author's note at the end - Ms. Gist's very lighthearted and frank explanations about basically fibbing some historical facts to make the story work better and to keep her work from being repetitive (specifically mentioning that she didn't want to include yet another July 4th celebration even though it would've been historically accurate) were written in a very delightful manner.

My main complaint is all the rain. Of course I don't know what weather was like in Seattle in the 1860s, but thunderstorms in Seattle today are pretty rare - I believe there were two last year and that was very unusual - and yet it always seems to be thunderstorming in this book.