3.5 ( )

3.5 ( )

4.5 "loved this book" stars!!

Brokedown Cowboy is the absolutely phenomenal second installment in Maisey Yates' fabulous Copper Ridge series. This divine friends to lovers romance features tortured and grieving widower Connor Garrett and his sassy, caring best friend, Felicity "Liss" Foster.

Ever since his wife's death three years earlier, Connor has just been going through the motions. He still puts in a hard day's work on the family ranch, but he has isolated himself from his friends and family. He drinks too much in an effort to numb his pain and he is angry, bitter and depressed. Connor does not want to move past his sorrow and although he knows his friends and family are worried about him, he deeply remains mired in his grief.

Liss has been friends with Connor since they were teenagers and she has been secretly in love with him just as long. She pushed aside her feelings for him after his marriage and managed a couple lackluster relationships of her own. She has remained a integral part of Connor's life and she continues to push him to stop drinking and take better care of himself. Their friendship is comfortable and close enough to withstand his moodiness and when Liss needs a place to stay after her landlady sells her rental house, Connor offers to let her move in with him until she can find a place of her own.

Not surprisingly, their new living situation is a little awkward for both Liss and Connor. Their close proximity brings a few surprises for each of them. Liss has managed to keep her desire for Connor in check, but that is much harder to do once she is living with him. She is also coming to the realization that her feelings for him are not as platonic she would like them to be. This coincides with the sudden resurgence of Connor's long dormant libido and he is absolutely blindsided by his sudden attraction to Liss. Once they realize their attraction is mutual, they indulge in some seriously hot, non-committed sex. But Connor is very uneasy with the changes he is undergoing and he briefly pulls away only to later agree to continue their unorthodox arrangement with a few stipulations. Their new agreement works well for a while, but Connor continues to try to maintain an emotional distance and Liss begins to realize that she wants (and deserves) more than he may ever be able to give her.

Brokedown Cowboy by Maisey Yates is more than a love story. It is also a beautiful novel of healing for both Connor and Liss. Their longstanding friendship provides a wonderful foundation for their transition to lovers and their relationship is both sweet and scorching hot. Although it takes time for Connor to work through his problems, this makes his transformation much more realistic. While it is not obvious at first, Liss also has a few issues to deal with and it is very gratifying watching finally stand up for herself. It is a marvelous addition to the Copper Ridge series and while the novel can be read as a standalone, I highly recommend the entire series. ( )

The story that is told within the pages of Brokedown Cowboy by Maisey Yates is a painfully heartbreaking one. Connor and Lissa's story is an emotional one. But this book also leaves you with the feeling that there is good that can come from pain. Happens when you least expect it to. In each book from her Copper Ridge series Ms. Yates manages to convey another degree of emotional depth. Whether it is seeking forgiveness, hoping to make a new start or overcoming grief and pain,her stories may break your heart. However by the end of the journey, she patches it back together and leaves you with a smile. Received an ARC for an honest review. ( )

7/22/16 Brokedown Cowboy won the RITA for Best Long Contemporary! So I have decided to provide the full review on my Tumblr blog, too! Check out my full review on
I'm Here for the Romance!

7/19/17 Here is my full review on Smart Bitches Trashy Books!

6/28/16 I am reviewing this for the Smart Bitches Trashy Books RITA Reader Challenge so I will update this with a link when that review goes live!



am a big fan of regency romance, so I thought I would step out of my comfort zone a little for the RITA Reader Challenge and read a contemporary. Well, that and I am apparently not the only fan of Regency romance so they were pretty much all spoken for by the time I got around to signing up- but I digress! I don’t usually gravitate towards contemporary romance and I have never read a “Western.” I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was not disappointed!

I was pretty much sucked in from the opening scene, where our hero is experiencing an anxiety attack. Connor Garrett, Oregon Ranch Owner and Grump Extraordinaire, lost his wife three years prior to our story’s beginning and he just cannot bring himself to move on. To top it off, just before our story starts the barn on Connor’s farm burned to the ground. Every night, whether he wakes from a panic attack or just can’t sleep, he drinks himself into a stupor and every morning one of his friends or family members come by to make sure he isn’t dead. Connor’s grief felt like a real living thing to me, it certainly was for him, and I found myself sympathizing with his inability to move on, even after it started impacting his relationship with our heroine.

Our heroine, Felicity Foster, who is none other than Connor’s very-best-friend-since-childhood, has been half in love with Connor since she was a teenager. Over the years Liss has become quite the expert at pushing those feelings wayyyyyy down, especially when Connor marries one of her closest friends and then even more so when that same friend dies in a tragic accident and Connor needs Liss in a very different way than he ever did before. Like a true friend she pushes it all aside and takes on a kind of caregiving role – buying Connor groceries and making him dinner, things like that. But then Liss’ boyfriend leaves her with a mountain of debt and no credit and then her landlord decides to sell the house she rents and it is Connor’s turn to take care of Liss by offering her a place to stay.

Liss is of course a little weary about living in such close proximity to the man of her literal and metaphorical dreams, but she convinces herself that maybe living with him will wear down some of the effect he has on her (yeah, right). Now I will admit at first I was like, “You’re telling me that you’ve been in love with this guy for nearly your entire life and you think living with him is going to solve that problem?” But as the story progresses, something that Yates does really well is show how important their friendship is to both Connor and Liss. They have been through a helluvalot together and they truly value that friendship- Connor especially, who has already faced loss and cannot fathom the idea of losing Liss as a friend. But this is a romance novel, not a friendship novel, and as such their friendship is tested and shit. gets. awkward.

That is something I really appreciated about this story: Yates does not romanticize what it is like to explore a sexual relationship with your best platonic friend of 20 years. She emphasizes how uncomfortable it is and I loved that! Connor and Liss share years of memories and baggage and that stuff doesn’t just go away just because you (sarcasm commencing) “see your best friend in a brand new light for the very first time ever” (sarcasm complete). After years of friendship Connor and Liss have feelings for each other, and it’s weird. Then they decided to act on those feelings, thinking they can somehow separate it all, and it’s weird. But they are at least trying to figure it all out and I feel that message is really important.

Something else I loved about this story was the rare treat of a sexually inexperienced hero. So, fans of the aforementioned – I know you are out there, pick this one up. I won’t say much more because I don’t want to spoil, but if that is a trope you enjoy then Connor is your man. I also really, really liked Liss. She seems to have been pushed around and guilt-tripped a lot in her young life and now that she is in her thirties she ain’t takin’ no shit. She is funny and brazen, with a slightly inappropriate sense of humor at times.

While I’m on “things I loved about this novel” I will also touch briefly on the secondary characters and the theme of friendship. I really enjoyed the secondary characters of this novel, Connor and Liss have an inner circle of four other friends whose chemistry was all very natural and very enjoyable to read. Clearly one of Yates’ strong suits is convincing the readers that the characters have been around for years and that’s a pretty strong suit in my opinion.

My (pretty minor) qualms with this novel were a) the conflict and b) the ending. The conflict of Connor moving on from his grief and the conflict of “friends to lovers” were basically so tightly interwoven here that I am considering them the same conflict. It was really the only conflict and, unfortunately, it wasn’t always quite enough to hold the story together. I can only listen to you whine about how you don’t want to lose your best friend so many times before it gets old. Also, I felt the ending was rushed and that really took a quite a bit away from the story for me. Again I don’t want to spoil so I won’t say much but I will say that Connor’s voice and character do a complete 180, and not in the redemptive way, and I do not feel that it did his character justice. I could have made peace with the conflict, or lack of, if the ending had justified allllllll the struggling they did but it just didn’t work for me.

That being said I still enjoyed this novel, my first contemporary Western, and am quite surprised to say that I will indeed be picking up others in the series. ( )