Description: Expected to gracefully embrace a life of privilege, a young woman cuts the purse strings that bind her to plot a new life course. But startling self-realization challenges everything she knows as she begins to study the diary of a seventeenth-century victim of the Salem witch trials. My review: My first experience with Meissner’s writing was “Lady in Waiting” and I was hooked. So when the opportunity to read this came up, I jumped on it. Meissner expertly weaves the past and present into a beautiful work of art with characters that leave lasting impressions. In this story, Lauren Durough must confront her own misconceptions in life and grow...
Book Review: Letters from Home
Special Sunday Post Letters from Home Chicago, 1944. Liz Stephens has little interest in attending a USO club dance with her friends Betty and Julia. She doesn’t need a flirtation with a lonely serviceman when she’s set to marry her childhood sweetheart. Yet something happens the moment Liz glimpses Morgan McClain. They share only a brief conversation – cut short by the soldier’s evident interest in Betty – but Liz can’t forget him. Thus, when Betty asks her to ghostwrite a letter to Morgan, stationed overseas, Liz reluctantly agrees. Thousands of miles away, Morgan struggles to adjust to the brutality of war. His letters from “Betty” are a comfort, their...
Book Review: Journey to Riverbend
Description: Michael Archer is nothing if not a man of his word. Though he was unable to save Ben Carstairs, Michael is determined to carry out Ben’s dying wish: to be reconciled with his father. Unfortunately, Sam Carstairs, one of the most ruthless businessmen on the frontier, has no use for his own son, much less a man of God seeking reconciliation. Soon after arriving in Riverbend, Michael meets and falls for the stunning Rachel Stone while waiting for Sam to return from a business trip. Beautiful yet guarded, Rachel seems to be running from a past as dark as Michael’s. When word reaches town that Sam has been kidnapped...
Book Review: The Miracle of Mercy Land
What if you had the power to amend choices you made in the past? Would you do it even if it changed everything? Mercy Land has made some unexpected choices for a young woman in the 1930s. The sheltered daughter of a traveling preacher, she chooses to leave her rural community to move to nearby Bay City on the warm, gulf-waters of southern Alabama. There she finds a job at the local paper and spends seven years making herself indispensible to old Doc Philips, the publisher and editor. Then she gets a frantic call at dawn—it’s the biggest news story of her life, and she can’t print a word of...
Book Review: Unbroken
This book completely took my breath away. I was in love with Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, but this one eclipses it—and then some. I downloaded this to my Kindle and thanked God I had it during a 16-hour roadtrip with my family. I was raptured by the book from page one. I read during each five-minute drive between errands and for seven solid hours at a time. The tale of these men and what they endured during the war. Hillenbrand creates characters that seem larger than life—characters that might not even fly if this was a “fiction” book. But the truth behind each chapter makes it all the more powerful and...