"The Promise of Forgiveness" by Marin Thomas

The Promise of Forgiveness is a family drama. The main character Ruby is a 31 year old single mother, who's had a string of unsuccessful relationships, and just recently learned that she'd been adopted as a baby. Ruby's adoptive parents have been dead for some time, and she was contacted by her birth father who wanted to meet her and invited her over to his ranch. In addition to dealing with feelings of abandonment and resentment towards her birth parents, Ruby has to resolve ongoing problems with her teenage daughter.  She also becomes embroiled in a local feud over her father's land ownership and meets an attractive cowboy who has plenty of emotional baggage of his own.

As you see, the novel definitely has a lot of different facets to it, and the story was very engaging and interesting. I liked the way relationships were presented in this novel. In particularly, Ruby's interactions with her birth father and with her daughter are touching and at times heart-wrenching. Joe's background story was also sad and poignant. I liked watching the family come together and each individual start healing and moving towards reconciliation.

The things that did not quite work for me were the writing style, Ruby's mother's story and the entire drama around ownership of Hank's ranch. I thought the plot line about Ruby's birth mother was not well developed. It painted her mother as very one-dimensional especially compared to the main characters. It was hard for me to understand why Hank and apparently many other men fell head over heels for her. The fact that she was a prostitute and then abandoned her family to go back to prostitution just added unnecessary drama to the already jam-packed story line. The same with suspense/local crime drama around Hank's ranch - a completely unnecessary and unbelievable plot line. In the little town where any rumor spreads like wild fire, several things were apparently so well concealed that it took Ruby's arrival to uncover them. Finally, the writing was a bit choppy for me. Unfortunately, I picked this up right after reading Truman Capote, and it was hard not to compare Capote's impeccable style to anything I read right after.

So overall, I rated this book 3 out of 5 stars. I did enjoy reading it, and the story has some good points about it, but it is no great literature.

I received an advanced copy of this novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.