Genre: Historical
Heat Level: Sensual (though I cringed my way through the sex scene)
Rating:

City girl. It was written all over her like a sign warning him to keep off. Sure, Slade McPherson would train her horse…With his ranch one bad day away from foreclosure, he can't afford to turn away a paying customer. But no way is this cowboy getting involved with a woman like Jordana Lawton—no matter how pretty she looks in a saddle.

Yet everything can change in an instant. A terrifying run-in with an angry bull tilts Slade's world off its axis, leaving him wounded and unable to compete in a race that could change his future, for good. With Jordana by his side, he just might stand a chance. But what happens when this old-school cowboy finds himself falling for a modern city girl?

Review

The Last Cowboy feels like a throw-back to the early 90s, when it was okay to have a perfect heroine fall inexplicably in love with hero who has the emotional intelligence of a surly twelve year old.

Dr Jordana Lawton is a budding endurance racer who brings her horse to the best trainer in the country, Slade McPherson, for assessment and training. Slade immediately dislikes her because she embodies two of his most hated traits: she’s late and she’s female. And he doesn’t even know she’s from New York yet, making her a “city slicker” (a term Slade uses so frequently I started picturing him as Jack Palance even though he’s supposedly in his thirties).

Slade’s in danger of losing his ranch and can’t turn away customers, though, so he doubles his fee (some kind of female tax, I guess) and Jordana agrees to pay it. Jordana—who embodies all the patience, gracefulness and confidence a woman apparently should—comes to love and respect the gruff cowboy, for reasons I really can’t fathom.

While the novel skims over reasons why Jordana feels increasingly attracted to Slade, it goes into far too many details about the horses themselves. I’d read about 20% of the novel before getting to a scene where the relationship between the humans took center stage.

Don’t get me wrong—I like modern cowboy stories. And, though I’ve never been obsessed with horses the way some women are, I’m sure they’re a perfectly reasonable way to get around in Wyoming. But the amount of time spent examining them and every aspect of endurance racing made me feel I was reading a novelized version of an equine book.

Or perhaps it’s more like a soap opera. You know how you can start watching a soap thirty years after it first aired and still pick up on what’s going on in the story because the characters will tell you—repeatedly? You could probably start reading The Last Cowboy at page 200 and still understand what happened in the pages you missed. For those of us who read from beginning to end, this is not a good thing. It means the characters and narrator say the same things over and over, constantly reminding you of who everyone is and what their problems are. To make matters worse, the dialogue is unnatural and corny.

For example, when Slade’s twin brother Griff comes home after losing all his money in the economic downturn, we’re reminded that the brothers were split up as children when their parents died, but Griff owns half the ranch. Several characters have already told us this, but Griff says it again, just in case we missed it. A few pages later, after Slade throws a complete hissy fit, Slade tells Jordana about Griff’s return, even though she was there when he came back. Slade’s problem?

“He’s a city slicker just like my ex-wife, Isabel. She was lazy. She screamed if she got some dirt under her painted fingernails. And she refused to clean out box stalls with me. She said it was a man’s work.”

Ah, the ex-wife Isabel. Someone else the reader hears about repeatedly, and always in the same scathing terms. The baddies in The Last Cowboy are all pure evil, Isabel included. She’s so bad, apparently, that she’s single-handedly turned Slade into a sexist prick. He doesn’t take on any female students and he goes out of his way to avoid women. He even doubles his usual training fee for Jordana because “he really didn’t want to have to teach a woman. They were nothing but trouble.”

With simplistic, reactionary attitudes like this, I couldn’t help but waffle between picturing Slade as a surly twelve year old and picturing him as a misogynistic eighty year old. Neither one does it for me as a romantic hero.

Reviewed by Katrina Latham

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