This was an audiobook read very nicely by Rose Robinson, about this woman who inherited her grandfather's sheep farm in Yorkshire and has her snotty sister come to stay. It started out great, with some nice snarky humor, but then the tone seemed to change, and it seemed like it lost a lot of its charm, becoming far less amusing and much more irritating.
There seemed to be two reasons for this. The first issue was that the romance part started to become a bit much, with this woman having tingles and spasms whenever this guy was around, and she was not even a teenager. It would still have been annoying even were she in her teens, but she was a mature woman. That's not to say she can't get excited about a potential man in her life, but must it be so pathetic and juvenile a reaction? The other issue was that her sister was so thoroughly and irredeemably obnoxious that I can't believe the farming sister didn't punch her right in the mouth already.
The spoiled-rotten city sister is named Cassandra, and the famer - or more technically the rancher (although they don't call them that in Britain) - is named Pandora. Those names were problematical. They didn't seem to apply, because Pandora was more like the Greek Cassandra in mythology, and conversely, Cassandra was more like a Pandora. Maybe the author intended it this way as irony, or she got the mythology mixed up? I don't know. I really didn't like either of them that much, but Cassandra not at all. Had she been simply irritating, but had a saving grace here and there, that would be one thing, but the author has made her such an extreme, outright selfish bitch, and she had Pandora barely even reacting to her insults and passive aggression, and her privileged behavior and downright abuse. It was far too much.
Pandora "farms" this rare breed of sheep for their fleece which she sells to crafts people. She's been warned by the local police that there's a gang of smugglers operating in the area, kidnapping sheep, yet when she hears a truck (in Britain, a 'lorry') go by, she's not even remotely triggered by it. Now this is a woman who's living on the thin edge of profitability, and who depends entirely on her sheep since her 'farm' does nothing else, and there's not even a mild suspicion in her mind; not even of wondering if that truck might be the smugglers? It made her look stupid and incompetent.
When the smugglers do actually show up, Pandora is slow to react. She doesn't own a gun because this is Britain, and while licensed firearms are permitted, and people on farms are more likely to own one than anyone, I guess, Pandora doesn't. That's fine, but she is armed with a phone to call the cops and she doesn't do that immediately. She does do it, but then she heads down to where the truck is, and without any plan as to what to do. Presumably it's a camera phone since all of them are these days, but she doesn't seem to think of trying to get a picture of the truck, or of the license plate or the men!
This is in northern Britain where there are drystone walls galore and Pandora doesn't even arm herself with some rocks! I hate maidens in distress stories, but in the context of that kind of story, which this really is in many ways, this would have been the perfect time to have the guy step up and do a little bit of heroics, yet he's as clueless as she is. If it were me, I'd have her throwing rocks at the truck to smash windows, or at the guys to chase them off, or I'd have the guy sneaking in the darkness and slashing a tire or two on the truck, but they don't even manage to get the license plate number between them! It was a disaster which made them both look useless. I know not everyone can step up and be heroic, but this is fiction, and I expected a bit more from the tough and seasoned woman that we're led to believe Pandora is supposed to be. It was sad.
When Cassandra arrives at the farm, with her son Hawthorn (I kid you not) who goes by Thaw for short, which in Britain sounds like Thor, she also brings along her son's tutor, who Pandora believes is Leo - the man she had a bad relationship with many years before. She believes Leo doesn't recognize her and then discovers this is Nat, Leo's brother, and learns that Leo died from a drug overdose, but it soon became clear that there is no Nat. This is Leo who is trying to redeem himself. Yawn. At least that's how it seemed to me. I may be wrong and I didn't care by then anyway. This whole thing was tedious and far too drawn-out with ominous and very soon irritating references back to Pandora's 'bad relationship'. It became annoying because it just dragged on and on and on.
So anyway, when the cop arrives, he sits drinking tea and eating cookies instead of getting out in his vehicle to see if he can track down these guys, and the last thing he thinks of doing is putting out an APB on the truck. I know this is a romance and a family problems story, not some sort of heroic action adventure, but seriously? It's not a Miss Marple story either, so a little more realism and depicting the police in a bit less of a lethargic light wouldn't hurt! It was at this point that I decided enough was way too much and I ditched it right there and then. God! I resented wasting my time on this story when I could have been listening to something worthwhile.
