305 pages
Rachel Fordham
Revell, 2022
Amazon Description: As Norah King surveys her family land in Iowa in 1880, she is acutely aware that it is all she has left, and she will do everything in her power to save it–even if that means marrying a man she hardly knows. Days before her wedding, Norah discovers an injured man on her property. Her sense of duty compels her to take him in and nurse him back to health. Little does she realize just how much this act of kindness will complicate her life and threaten the future she’s planned.
Norah’s care does more than aid Quincy Barnes’s recovery–it awakens his heart to possibilities. Penniless and homeless, he knows the most honorable thing he can do is head on down the road and leave Norah to marry her intended. But walking away from the first person to believe in him proves much harder than he imagined.
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Thanks to the Revell Reads program for sending me a copy of Where the Road Bends for review. All thoughts and opinions are entirely my own.
If I had to give a few keywords or phrases to represent Where the Road Bends I would say it’s a sweet, clean romance about second chances and forgiveness. Starting over and leaving behind a past you’re not proud of is the overarching theme, as well as finding the place and people you belong with.
That said, it’s not really what I was expecting. The back cover description doesn’t really do a good job accurately representing the general direction that the story will go in, so I was surprised when there was a twist around the 25% mark that I felt changed the story direction. Related to that, I thought the beginning felt contrived. There are some stories that do a good job with instant attraction, but I didn’t love the way this one was written. Once you get to the twist it was much better, though.
While this wasn’t my favorite of Rachel Fordham’s books, Where the Road Bends is still a solid historical romance with interesting conflict all the way through and a satisfying resolution.