(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)
There’s something about a plucky, funny protagonist who won’t take no for an answer that absolutely reels you in.
While society as a whole, and indeed their own family, are happy to tow whatever the agreed line of mainstream behaviour has been deemed to be by some sort of secretive collective assent, tenacious, highly individualistic protagonists simply won’t play along, and so if you like that kind of character sticking it to the establishment, in whatever form it takes, then you will LOVE, and yes in all caps, Junebug McBride, the unstoppable force of nature that powers Kit McBride Get a Wife by Amy Barry.
Set in Buck’s Creek, Montana in 1886, where men are MEN and women are supposed to stay demurely in the background cooking and cleaning and not having a personality or an opinion, Kit McBride Get a Wife is a novel that dares to tell a romantic tale that is a cut above the ordinary heartfelt stories in the genre.
While Junebug’s name is not in the title, and the rom-com-ing that takes places is centred on her older brother Kit – she is one of five surviving children of nine, and as the youngest and only girl has to do what she’s told and cook and clean without complaint – she is the 14-year-old idiosyncratic lifeforce that infuses the book with wit and hilarity and more than a little pushing off the societal norms envelope.
‘Montana? Oh, it’s just a little way out west,’ Willabelle said cheerily.
But it turned out Montana was more than just a little way out west. It turned out it was a lot out west. On-the-very-edge-of-the-frontier kind of out West. And it also turned out that Maddy’s luck was about to get much worse.
She is, because of her unwillingness to speak and act in expected ways, the engine of the plot as she decides, sick of tending to the household duties that her four older cowboy siblings (Morgan, Kit, Beau, Jonah), to place an ad in The Matrimonial News, the very print-based Tinder of the mid-to-late 1880s, where lonely souls can place and answers ads and try to find marital bliss.
Or at least make life somewhat less alone.
It’s a genius idea in the boundary and consequence-free world of Junebug’s mind, and all she expects to have happen is to correspond with a range of potential wives for Kit, pick one, invite to come to Buck’s Creek and let love, or whatever it is people have when they fall for each other, follow its natural path.
What she gets instead is the arrival of a woman with aspirations far beyond her station who is intent on marrying for money, and who when she sees what’s on offer at Buck’s Creek, alights for pastures far more money-laden, leaving behind her exhausted and distressed Irish maid, Maddy Mooney, who finds herself accidentally assuming the identity of her avaricious former employer, and with it, a potential marriage to one Kit McBride who is blissfully unaware of what Junebug has surreptitiously done.
If you think this is a situation ripe for much hilarity and witty banter and a mess of problematic consequences, then you would be right, and Barry has an absolute ball in Kit McBride Get a Wife seeing where all the Junebug-propelled pieces might land.
(courtesy official Amy Barry Facebook page)
Billed as a perfect read for “fans of Bridgerton, Yellowstone and Calamity Jane“, Kit McBride Get a Wife lands very much in the realm of the final one of those pop culture allusions, with Junebug refusing, even when it becomes clear her foolproof plan has very much been village idioted by circumstances well beyond her control – while her plan, deceptive as it was, was reasonably straightforward, it failed to allow for the vagaries and glorious inconsistencies of human nature – that she’s done the wrong thing.
She seems to believe she can tough it out, and it will all work out marvellously, and while there are more than a few potholes and great mountainous hurdles to clamber over, this is a rom-com, a genre that eats the impossible for a romantic breakfast and declares it all more than doable.
But ah, the fun to be had to getting over all those hurdles and navigating through and around myriad challenges that don’t let themselves be confined to the carefully laid but ill-thought plans of an impatient 14-year-old who simply wants out of the cookhouse and far away from the washhouse, thank you very much.
And this is where Kit McBride Get a Wife really sings and shines and leaves you giggling like a fiend; you know the mayhem that will ensue when Junebug’s plan is exposed, and it is as chaotic and funny as you’d expect, especially when it looks like Kit and Maddy, who is not the intended betrothed, find themselves falling hard for each other.
‘You look kicked.’
‘I look kicked?’
‘You surely do!’ Junebig laughed. ‘And I’m betting on not needing to buy you that train ticket when your leg’s healed.’
‘Well, that’s a bet you’d lose,’ Maddy told her. Dear Lord. Imagine being stuck here in Buck’s Creek for the rest of her days …
For all its hilarity and rule-breaking slapstick sense of fun, what really zings Kit McBride Get a Wife right up to the top of the rom-com pile, quite apart from its novel Western setting, is the way Barry goes to so much trouble to recreate the era.
While First Nations issues are more of a footnote than anything in the book, Kit McBride Get a Wife is a rom-com, not a historical or moral treatise, and so what it focuses on is the way in which the society of the time, still nascent in the face of the seemingly unstoppable western expansion of European settlement, has straightjacketed people into very myopic ways of doing things (not that different to now, of course).
Junebug, for her own selfish reasons and not to make any kind of bold, status quo-crushing statement, dares to challenge them, and it’s in that fertile well of what men and women are supposed to do and be than this gloriously fun and heartfelt novel really finds its feet.
Humourous to the hilt but emotionally thoughtful in ways you may not see coming, Kit McBride Get a Wife is a joy to read, serving up the requisite romance but in a way that feels fresh, vital and interesting, bolstered by a setting ripe for expectations to be upended, and with characters, one in particular, who find their idea of life and how it should happen and be beautifully upended in romantically fun ways that means nothing will ever be the same again.