One Fine Cowboy

July 5, 2010
Stock characters and a predictable plot mar Kennedy's second contemporary western romance (after Cowboy Trouble). Charlie Banks, a perky Rutgers graduate student and devout PETA member, leaves New Jersey for Wyoming, expecting to research a genuine horse whisperer. Instead she finds handsome but inarticulate cowboy Nate Shawcross, whose ex-girlfriend advertised a dude ranch, took the customers' money, and skipped town. The supposed contrast between Charlie's animal rights activism and Nate's career vanishes by chapter three, when Charlie decides that "aybe horses didn't mind being ridden... like Nate said." The rest of the story—Charlie falls hard for Nate, copes easily with his quirky uninvited guests, puts her city smarts to work helping him handle his avaricious ex—would be a better fit for a much shorter book.

Starred review from September 15, 2010
When graduate student Charlie Banks is assigned research on horse whisperers, her PETA-inspired belief that riding a horse is tantamount to animal cruelty threatens to affect the objectivity of her study. Still, given no choice by her supervisor, Charlie heads for Latigo Ranch in Wyoming. A dyed-in-the-wool New Jersey girl, she finds nothing to like about the wide-open spaces of the Equality State, especially because the actual ranch bears little or no resemblance to the picture-perfect paradise in the brochure. The last thing rancher Nate Shawcross wants at Latigo is a meddling woman, and an uninvited one, at that. Burned by his former girlfriend, Nate is happy with his horses, the only living things he can trust. After an initial altercation, Charlie is set to leave, but her car breaks down, and theres nothing she can do but wait until the parts arrive. A stubborn city girl meets a stubborn rancher in this novel about how opposites, even those with preconceived notions about each other, attract. Kennedy (Cowboy Trouble, 2010) has written an entertaining and humorous romance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)