Two Brides Too Many-Mona Hodgson

Two Brides Too Many
Mona Hodgson
WaterBrook, May 4 2010, $13.99
ISBN: 9780307458902

In 1895 Portland, Maine, widower Wyatt Sinclair informs his four daughters, his position as a locomotive has been abolished, but he has a job in Paris with a single room apartment that he must take. He has his two oldest daughters Kat and Nell advertise in the Cripple Creek Prospector for husbands while his younger children Ida and Vivian will stay with their Aunt Alma until they can join their older siblings in Colorado.

Nell and Kat take the train to Cripple Creek to meet their fiancés Judson Archer and Patrick Maloney respectively. Neither meets their respective mail order bride at the station. Kat finds her future spouse is a womanizing drunk and dumps him while Judson fails to show up. A fire has both sisters helping out with Kat rescuing a now orphaned little girl Rosita whose mother died in the inferno; and Nell reads to the frightened kids. Kat has an incident with new Bostonian Dr. Morgan Cutshaw who reads her the riot act as he mistakenly believes she is an incompetent midwife while Judson learns his fiancée is in town.

Two Brides To Many is a fun western romance starring likable sisters who though are fish out of water quickly adapt to their situation although not too easily. The strong support cast brings to life Cripple Creek at the end of the previous century just after a deadly blaze cripples the town; thus in some ways the locale steals the show. However, the entertaining story line is carried by the siblings whose men have a Rocky Mountain worth of self-caused issues to climb to win their hearts.

Harriet Klausner