An oddly disconnected, lightly inspiring, and un-suspenseful inspirational romantic suspense novel.
When a pregnant, young Amish woman is betrayed by her boyfriend and banished from her abusive family, she’s sent to an uncle far away, where she meets an EMT who makes her believe in a better future.
Sadie Detweiler discovers she’s pregnant and expects to marry the man who’s been courting her, but instead he cruelly rejects her. Then her father takes her lover’s side: “He’s got no reason to lie, girl”—and turns his back on Sadie: “I’m not your father. You are nothing to me.” She is stunned and humiliated when he sends her away to stay with relatives. Just a few short weeks after she arrives in Kentucky, her grandmother Verba Stauffer dies, and she meets Noah, a kind Amish EMT. Noah knows something isn’t right in the Stauffer household. The family is secretive and suspicious, and at first he thinks perhaps they’re abusing the quiet, pretty Sadie. Soon it’s discovered that Verba was poisoned, and rumors fly that the Stauffers produce and distribute moonshine. Noah likes Sadie, but her family might be dangerous, and he’s not sure how to react to her pregnancy. Yet the more he learns about her, the more he realizes how horribly she’s been treated, especially by the men in her life. Author Gray continues her Amish of Hart County romantic suspense series, which ambles through a story that’s mildly entertaining but lacks depth and edge. The father is villainous, the hero is saintly, the uncle is cartoonishly ineffective and hand-wringing about it. And while the plot offers Sadie the divine gift of a safe new life, it shrugs over the poisoning deaths of four other people.
An oddly disconnected, lightly inspiring, and un-suspenseful inspirational romantic suspense novel.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-246921-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avon Inspire/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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