Love by the Letter

4.5 stars
I got really emotionally attached to these two characters, so I definitely enjoyed the story! A good opening to the series and a book I've put off reading for far too long.

Gripe: mantel was spelled “mantle” four times, and undue spelled as undo...it just struck me as really ironic in a book where one character's bad spelling causes issues for him. ;)

While this was a cute story, I had trouble buying the tutoring aspect. I've tutored children for fifteen years, and if I had done it the way the leading lady in this book did, I wouldn't have been in business long, not to mention how illiterate my fellow community members would have been. The lady said she wouldn't correct the guy's reading. If that's the case, how was he supposed to learn to read better? That might be solved by her other suggestion: that he guess at what the words are. That's something I've often had to un-teach children in order to teach them the proper way to read, which is to sound out the words rather than guess. If those two things weren't bad enough, the lady then had the gall to nearly burst out laughing at her student as he stumbled through a page of written words. That seemed so out of character for her and was entirely distracting through that scene that I'm not sure what was the point of that scene.

After those three things, I wasn't holding my breath to be warmly entertained by the remainder of this story. However, I found it to be a sweet tale. I really admired the leading man and the gumption it took to ask the gal he liked to teach him to better read and write. Talk about brave! He was the sort of hero I love reading about: humble, smart in his own way, courteous, thoughtful, and a cowboy type, even if he didn't wear the Stetson.

While I wasn't a fan of Rachel's feminist mother, I liked her brother well enough to try the next book in this series, which features him, if I'm not mistaken.

I was not compensated for my honest review.