#TBRChallenge Review: Simple Jess

Simple Jess by Pamela Morsi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars 

She'd married well. And she'd done it to save the family another winter mouth to feed. She hadn't liked her husband all that much. But she'd been soft-spoken and loyal to him and had birthed his son. She'd minded her husband as she had her family and would have done whatever he said until the day she died. But he had died. That had changed everything. 

This month's #TBRChallenge was “With a Little Help From My Friends”, the synopsis for this made it sound like the townspeople were going to, helpfully, push Althea into a marriage and while it was a little more forceful trying to push, and not to who the two sides were pushing, Althea did get a push towards considering marriage again, so it counts, I say! 

Althea's mom died when she was a baby and her dad remarried pretty quickly, leaving Althea with her aunt and uncle. This caused Althea to grow up feeling beholden, so when the time came for marriage, she just went along with the first guy, Paisley, who could provide for her. Paisley ends up dying in the first couple years of their marriage, leaving Althea with a three year old, Baby-Paisley, and a coveted farm. Going by her own childhood, she doesn't want to marry again because that spells abandonment and she doesn't ever want Baby-Paisley to feel how she did and she wants to be in control of her life for once. This upsets the two main families on the mountain (this takes place in early 1900s Ozarks) that want to one up each other with control of the farm. One man from each side of the two families is offered up to Althea, Eben and Oather, for her to marry. 

They took him for granted. They all did, Althea realized, including herself. His value to the community continued to be errantly minimized, because Jesse himself was underestimated. He was different. He was like no one else. He was not an equal. Did that make him less? No, Althea thought to herself. Not necessarily. 

While Althea is trying to stand strong on not remarrying, she does understand that she needs some help on the farm and offers a deal to “Simple Jess”, he work for her for a few months and she'll give him her late husband's pack of hunting dogs. Jesse has always wanted dogs of his own and happily takes the deal. I went into Simple Jess honestly thinking Jesse would turn out to have dyslexia or some other specific learning disability that the author could kind of do a little cop-out to, but when Jesse was born, the cord was around his neck, causing his brain to be without oxygen for a while, leaving him with intellectual disability. As this takes place in the early 1900s, there are terms and words used that we consider slurs now, so be very aware of that if choosing to pick this up. 

When I first started this, what captured me immediately, was the heart of the story and characters. This is second in a series, you can tell Jesse's sister and her husband were the main characters from the first, but I had no trouble starting here. Jesse is not always the same as others, he takes longer to think things through and gets overwhelmed easier but what I liked was how the author also showed the values he can bring and how he can understand. As he helps Althea around the farm, readers can tell he has feelings for her, with Althea learning about him and slowly getting building blocks (he kills a deer for her, bonds with Baby-Paisley) to see him a different way. With the characters and situation, it makes sense that their romance doesn't really heat up until the latter half of the book, I'm talking around 85%. 

While I understood and thought it worked/made sense that their romance would take longer to develop, what I wasn't as into was how the middle meandered away from Althea and Jesse. If you're more of a series reader, wanting more of the setting world in your stories than a straight focus on the main couple, then you'd probably enjoy this more. If you ever watched the show The Outsiders, this had some of that hillbilly mountain people feel. There was a secondary couple, Eben and Oather's sister Mavis, that took up a good amount of the second half and you're probably not going to be a fan of Eben and enjoy him getting a HEA (he's a playboy with daddy issues who emotionally and physically hurt/s Mavis). Oather also gets his own spotlight some with the issues that could and do come with being gay in the 1900s Ozarks (there was a little speech from his dad at the end that made my eyes water and became very close to stealing the best emotional moment). 

So, while I thought the beginning was slow building heartfelt good, the middle meandered away with more focus on the setting/world-building characters, a secondary romance that I wished wasn't, and a latter second half that felt pretty rushed. However, this was different in some good ways and I think it still should hold a spot on romance lists, with the caveat of content warning outdated terms. Althea didn't learn to love Jesse in spite of but because of, Jesse's Big Gesture at the end would put a lot of other heroes to shame.

View all my reviews