Tender Wings of Desire

Finished May 13
Tender Wings of Desire by Colonel Sanders

I heard about this book through a news article, and I found that it was free to download through amazon. I downloaded and found it a quick read.
First, the cover has little to do with the plot. The time setting of the story is not given, but the main character Madeline, rides a horse as she escapes her parent's home on the eve of her wedding, and has packed only a few simple dresses. She does end up in a small coastal village, where she works in a tavern, and meets a sailor named Harland Sanders, who is American. He does have white blond hair, and dark framed glasses.
Madeline did not enamor me to her, as in the first sentence of the book I found that she detested embroidery, something I love to do. She also wasn't good at any of the other things young ladies of her social class and time were expected to be good at, didn't want to fulfill her parent's expectations of a good marriage to a man of status (or get married at all really), and instead of telling anyone, ran away without a plan or much in the way of money.
Her brother was sympathetic to her situation and seemed like he would have supported her if she had stood up for herself. What she apparently wanted was an education, but she did not end up having that wish fulfilled.
When she, working as a waitress and maid in the tavern, meets the sailor Harland, she is attracted to him, but partly because he is a common man. She doesn't interact with the inhabitants of the village apart from the very few who work at the tavern, and her rooms there seem better than most working class accommodation would have been.
It was also surprising to me that Madeline would choose to give herself to Harland before marriage, given that KFC started in the American south and this book is set more than a hundred years earlier (something I surmised from the lack of automobiles).
The writing was okay, but several plot points slip. For example, when she arrived at the tavern, she tied her horse to a post out front, and then we hear nothing about the horse until the final pages of the novella. The conversations are lacklustre, and none of the characters, other than perhaps the tavern worker who hires Madeline, Caoimhe, is that interesting.
I would say "don't bother," unless you really just want to say you've read it.