Book Review- The Broken Trail

The Broken Trail Review

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Christa MacDonald pulls you into her story in the first couple pages and I found myself putting off other responsibilities to read a few more pages.

Katherine Grant is very good at her job, but she needs a break. She takes an assignment at a small town school hoping for a change of pace. Instead she finds constant tension with the school director who may or may not be sabotaging her.

Mac is a stubborn control freak who is drawn to Katherine from the first time he sees her. Even though he frequently gets burned by her temper.

I really appreciated that Katherine and Mac were no longer in their 20s. This is no coming of age/first romance/young adult romance novel. These are two single adults in their 30s/40s who have lived life and now are drawn to each other. I found this incredibly refreshing. The author also does an excellent job of portraying a small town. So often in fiction small towns are either idyllic or the scene of a horror story. There seems to be no middle ground. Christa MacDonald paints Sweet River as a beautiful remote small town, with kind people, but she doesn’t paint over the problems that seem to come especially with those smaller towns. She also does an excellent job of showing the strengths and weaknesses that can come with a private school.

The book starts incredibly strong, and Christa MacDonald’s strength as a storyteller and author is clearly visible from the very beginning, but I felt it didn’t end as strong. It has a fulfilling ending, and I’m thinking it comes back to what I often say, this isn’t my normal genre so I’m chalking it up to I’m just not as used to romance novels.