Review: Wild Card by Karina Halle

I have so much admiration and appreciation for an author who can surprise me. When you’ve read dozens upon dozens of books by a single author, it becomes increasingly difficult to be surprised anymore. But Karina Halle remains at the top of a very small list of authors who never fail to give me that moment of pause where I stop to think ‘Wow, this is different! She did it again! She went in another completely different direction I never expected and I absolutely love it!’ Those were my exact thoughts as I began reading Wild Card, a story that takes place on a cattle ranch in Canada, a beautifully unputdownable story of second chances, wild adventure, and unrelenting love, a story that further cements Karina Halle as one of the most versatile, creative minds I have the pleasure of reading.

This is one of those books that gripped me on the very first page. As the story opened, Shane Nelson is sitting at a local bar, surrounded by regulars, and he’s stunned silent to hear his first love is back in town. I can’t explain how or why that was so instantly compelling to me, but it had me rapt right away. Immediately I knew I’d be stepping into a small town romance, a story with the potential for a second chance between young lovers whose romance was clearly cut short, a story full of snarky dialogue between townsfolk that made me wish I were bellied up to the bar right along with them. Straight out of the gate I was swept up by the feel of this book. It only took moments for me to knew I’d be completely taken by this man in a cowboy hat, a man lost in the memories of the past, a hard-working man clearly admired for his devotion to his land, his town and his family, a man who so obviously loves his ranch as wildly as he loves the one that got away.

Halle is the first author I think of when I want to be carried away to a new location and made to feel and smell and see all the sights of a land I’m so unfamiliar with. I’m an indoor girl stepping into the great outdoors on this particular adventure, and in true Karina Halle fashion, the reader is made to breathe in as much emotion as they are of the breathtaking location the story is set in. Wild Card is as much a love story between Shane and Rachel as it is a love story between Shane and his home. It’s very much an adventures of the heart, a lesson in the power of love, but it’s undeniably an exciting, unpredictable testament to the power of nature, an ode to the Canadian wilderness, to the unpredictable land both respected and feared by the people who know it so well.

I can’t even tell you how much I loved this book. I never thought I’d fall so deeply in love with a romance set on a ranch, with a cowboy on the cover, where the sweat and dirt is as plentiful as the romance within its pages. But I did. I fell so hard for this beautifully unforgettable story, a story unlike anything else this author has written, an emotionally tumultuous, blissfully romantic story of longing and second chances. This story is a relentless barrage of emotion on every single page. The broken romance between Shane and Rachel is enough to captivate the reader all by itself, but when you throw in flashbacks of horrific memories from the past, the wild forces of nature, the tattered bonds between family, the palpable suffering of broken hearts, the secondary characters you can’t help but adore, or how unbelievably sexy the story is, you end up with a book that is EVERYTHING I could ever want as a reader. Wild Card is a sexy, emotional, completely enthralling love story from cover to cover, a heart-stopping page turner that I wish I could read again for the first time. I’m wildly in love with this book, I couldn’t put it down, and I CAN NOT WAIT for more of the North Ridge series.

About the Author

 Karina Halle is a former travel writer and music journalist and The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestselling author of The Pact, Racing the Sun, Sins & Needles and over 25 other wild and romantic reads. She lives on an island off the coast of British Columbia with her husband and her rescue pup, where she drinks a lot of wine, hikes a lot of trails and devours a lot of books.