Blue Willow

Blue Willow
Deborah Smith

I bought this because I liked the design on the spine. It turns out to be a promotional copy, and has lots of funny typos, but it still manages to be five hundred and thirty-three pages of readable plot, which I finished in three days.

The story follows the lives of Lily MacKenzie, a muscular, independent red-headed farm girl from small-town Georgia, and Artemas Colebrook, heir to a broken family and a bankrupt china company. To him, Lily has always symbolized goodness, security, and his real home. To her, Artemas is the lost prince who will come back to a hard world and restore what was unthinkingly squandered and broken. Both dream of the time when they can be together, enjoying treasured home. But the hard, cold world has other plans.

When still a boy, Artemas realizes the destruction and cruelty of his parents and decides to protect and raise his five younger siblings. His grandmother trains him in the family business and leaves it to him when he is barely out of adolescence. He vows to do what is best for his family and restore their crushed legacy, no matter what the cost. It's an unrelenting vow, even when he realizes it means he must give up Lily.

She grows up with hard work and the pure love of her parents, writing encouraging letters to the older boy she met as a child. But when her parents are killed in a terrible accident and Artemas ignores her attempts at contact, her world is shattered. Bitter and grieving, she leaves her home to fight out a new life in Atlanta.

And so their worlds separate into difficult lives. Until Artemas moves the headquarters of the now fabulously successful family corporation to Atlanta, and hires Lily's husband to design the building. On opening day, the building crumbles, killing Lily's husband and son, maiming Artemas's brother, and killing his sister. Hatred and blame reawaken the old wounds between Lily and Artemas, resurrecting the pain of lost dreams as well.

But this is a romance novel (yeah, I was tricked by the cover copy), so everything is likely to turn out happily, even if it takes more than five hundred pages of angst, shouting, misunderstanding, and sex to do it.

The main characters are believable enough to root for, but many of the minor characters are not well developed. There are several scenes and veins of domestic abuse, but they do not make the kind of deep impact on the plot that such a situation does on a real life. Likewise, several other plot points end up being trite or shallow, or just don't really make sense. Multiple times I read a passage with the feeling that it was there just because the author needed it to be, rather than because the characters believably would have taken that course.

That being said, I did enjoy the book, overall. It was written as entertainment, and it entertained me. I'm not likely to read it again, but it was worth my metro time for a couple of days.