Synopsis:

Hold on to your hats: The authors who brought you the New York Times bestseller My Plain Jane, which Booklist praised as “delightfully deadpan” (starred review) and Publishers Weeklycalled “a clever, romantic farce” (starred review), are back with another irreverent historical adventure.

Welcome to 1876 America, a place bursting with gunslingers, outlaws, and garou—better known as werewolves.

And where there are garou, there’re hunters: the one and only Calamity Jane, to be precise, along with her fellow stars of Wild Bill’s Traveling Show, Annie Oakley and Frank “the Pistol Prince” Butler.

After a garou hunt goes south and Jane finds a suspicious-like bite on her arm, she turns tail for Deadwood, where there’s talk of a garou cure. But rumors can be deceiving—meaning the gang better hightail it after her before they’re a day late and a Jane short.

In this perfect next read for fans of A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, bestselling authors Cynthia Hand, Jodi Meadows, and Brodi Ashton bring their signature spark to the side-splittin’, whopper-filled (but actually kind of factual?) tale of Calamity Jane.

While My Calamity Jane didn’t eclipse the previous two Janies for me, I still enjoyed it. I’m not a big fan of westerns and when I discovered one of the prompts on my reading challenge was to read a western, I immediately decided it would be this one. I waited all year to read it! But then I had the unfortunate timing of trying to read it during the most stressful presidential election ever. I might have been a bit distracted….

“Well, I figure if a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one.”

Hand, Ashton, Meadows; My Calamity Jane

BUT I did laugh and smile and swoon. It was all good fun. The characters were refreshingly updated. Jane was snarky and took no bull from anyone. Annie was confident and brave. Frank was sweet and good to the core. I have to admit that I purchased this one without even reading the synopsis (I promise I rarely do that), so the fact that it was about werewolves was an unexpected surprise. It tied the story together very nicely and gave the characters a unified purpose.

One of my favorite things about the Janies is when the authors break the fourth wall and talk directly to the reader. I always have a good chuckle: