In which I stumble across another bad book

I borrowed ‘Heart of the West,’ a book with 500+ pages, from the library just the other day. It was a historical Western fiction and I thought that I’d like to burrow into my couch to read what seemed to be a good book with a solid romance and an intriguing history about Montana. So, after finishing my school work, I began to read this book. I must admit that it was quite good at the beginning, and for the following hours I read for, my head was filled with cowboys, pistols, ladies in voluminous dresses…But the entertainment, the intrigue this book had first had, began to dwindle in the author’s attempt to make, what I came to realize by and bye, a Harlequin like romance into a historical fiction by shoving a lot of history in. It was like…’Thorn Birds’ meets ‘Gone with the Wind’ meets a smutty Harlequin romance. But I continued to read into the early hours of the morning on a school day. I don’t know why; I guess it was because I kept hoping the story would somehow develop and transcend its mediocre Harlequin-like plotline. But lo-and-behold, by 5 in the morning, I have finished skimming through, and resented each hour that had gone to waste. I have stopped reading Harlequin romance, I don’t like the way it influences my writing, but I picked up this book because the cover read that it was similar to “Thorn Birds” a classic I had loved reading when I had been young. This book really is an odd one. Had it been compressed into a 90,000ish word book, it would have been a decent Harlequin romance, but this authors attempt to turn it into a historical fiction didn’t serve its purpose.