3.5⭐️ – Money won’t solve all your problems, especially when the money is your parents’, not yours, and they’re the ones creating the problems. To escape her parents’ insane plan of having her inseminated with a mix of their own DNA to create the perfect child, Thisbe Vandergoss applies as a mail-order bride under an assumed name and is shipped to Sirona, on the other side of the galaxy, to marry a seventy-six-year-old settler. A series of misunderstanding brings her to the wrong farmer. Shiloh ‘Shy’ Kerridan left her own fucked-up life on Earth many years ago when she moved as far as possible. She’s content with her life of growing apples and making goat cheese with as little contact as possible with other inhabitants of Sirona. She likes her routine and the quiet her 30 acres afford her, despite the unexplained failures of her droids – which, coincidentally, began when she refused to sell her land to a mining facility hoping to take advantage of the platinum vein lying underneath. And she’s absolutely not ready for the beautiful and oh-so-sexy stranger showing up on her doorstep.
A rich girl with countless business degrees who loves baking above all, a recluse on a faraway planet, these two should never have met so it must be fate… At first, Shy is very unwelcoming but Thisbe is so charming, she can’t help but like her. The more she lets her in, the more she likes her. Shy’s surliness doesn’t scare Thisbe away and they end up falling in love very quickly. I don’t mind instalust, not so much instalove, but once again, I guess sometimes circumstances such as shared danger can explain it.
Maybe the very serious and scary conditions of Thisbe’s flight from Earth could have been more developed, but I didn’t mind that this ended up being a light read. The writing was uneven, with a few clumsy sentences and others that were incredibly lovely. The descriptions were cool and made me wish I could see Sirona with my own eyes. All in all, Starfall Ranch was a fun and easy read, with sweet characters in a promising new world.
Jude in the Stars 