The Harvest of Grace

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Title: THE HARVEST OF GRACE
Author: Cindy Woodsmall
Publisher: Waterbrook Press
August 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7398-6
Genre: Inspirational/contemporary/Amish

Sylvia Fisher loves Elam, but she isn’t sure she wants to marry when Elam thinks they should. She has taken over her dad’s dairy cow business and it is beginning to show a profit. But Elam wants to marry in the fall and has already signed a business agreement with Sylvia’s dad, making him co-owner of their farm. Elam plans for him and Sylvia to live in Sylvia’s grandfather’s house—which was deeded to Sylvia when her grandfather died. But Sylvia balks, wanting to wait a bit. She asks Elam for a few weeks to decide. But then Elam does the unthinkable and turns to Sylvia’s sister, Rachel, and asks her to marry him instead.

Aaron Blank has been in rehab since due to his hateful crimes and drunkenness he basically murdered his own sister. Now he’s sober and returning home to talk his parents into selling out their dairy farm and moving to town where Aaron has put a down payment on a shop. The first thing Aaron does when he gets home is go out to the cabin on the property to board it up and get rid of his drunken friends who hang out there. But he is stunned to find a woman living there instead!

Sylvia flees her father’s house to get away from Elam’s inappropriate advances after he marries her sister, but her father disowns her due to this decision. She takes a job on the Blank farm, running their dairy business and beginning to turn a profit there. But Aaron and Sylvia are at odds. He wants to sell out—but his father refuses to believe that Aaron has changed and loves Sylvia as a daughter. Will Aaron and Sylvia find common ground?

THE HARVEST OF GRACE is the satisfying conclusion to the best selling An Ada’s House series. The books are tied together with characters from different stories all having points of views and continuing bits in their stories, so readers will want to read the books in order to get the full story. However, if you don’t have The Hope of Refuge or The Bridge of Peace, then there is a brief synopsis of both stories included at the front of this book that will help.

I couldn’t help but feel for Sylvia, losing everything she loved and held dear to get away from her sister’s husband and I wish her father would have been more understanding to her plight. Aaron was this absolutely insufferably horrific character from The Bridge of Peace that I can’t believe became the hero in this book, but Ms. Woodsmall did a stellar job of transforming his abominable characteristics in book two into someone well actually loved and rooted for in THE HARVEST OF GRACE. If you like Amish fiction, then you want to read this series. A glossary is included at the back of the book. $13.99. 337 pages.