The Brightest Hope by Naomi Dawn Musch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I wasn’t sure how the author was going to take the “bad boy” of book #2 and make him the hero of book #3 … but she nailed it! What a great end to this trilogy. Two emotionally wounded people who are drawn together against their will only to be torn apart when the unimaginable happens. Plenty of twists and turns and just the right amount of sighs. Highly recommend this one – but read The Deepest Sigh and The Softest Breath first!
The Softest Breath by Naomi Dawn Musch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. This is the second book in the series. I loved the first, The Deepest Sigh, and this one might even be better. The wonderfully rounded characters are both endearing and flawed. The setting is post-WWI when so many changes were happening both socially and industrially. The hero is charmingly old-school, and the heroine is snappily modern. The tension between them is believable and understandable. I didn’t want to put it down!
This book, as well as The Deepest Sigh, was originally published by Desert Breeze Publishing which has since gone out of business. Author Musch is putting the books back in production independently and is releasing book three, The Brightest Hope, on August 1, 2019. I never really thought I liked books written in this era, but she’s proved me wrong. I’ll be first in line to get my copy!
Yours Truly, Thomas by Rachel Fordham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
There is a lot to like about this story. The characters are engaging, the story premise is interesting, the setting is charming, and there’s a big dog in it. I love stories with dogs in them. However – you saw that coming, right? – it could have benefited from another round of editing. There are grammatical/punctuation errors, and if you just read over those, they won’t bother you, but there are more issues that should have been addressed. However – because every review should have two of these – it’s still an enjoyable story.
My Dearest Dietrich: A Novel of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Lost Love by Amanda Barratt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
No history geek worth his or her salt hasn’t heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Including me. I knew the bare bones of his story, but there was a lot I didn’t know. I knew nothing about Maria von Wedemeyer. Now I do!
I’d been looking forward to this story since I first heard that it was going to release. I’ve read several of Amanda Barratt’s historical romance novellas and enjoyed them. This book did not disappoint. Barratt did a great job of putting the flesh on these historical figures. She shows a side of Bonhoeffer that the history books never could.
You don’t have to be a WWII buff, or even that much of a history buff, to enjoy this novel. This story is about the people – not the history. If you know history, then you know the ending, but the getting there is a very good read.
Cameo Courtships: 4 Stories of Women Whose Lives Are Touched by a Legendary Gift by Susanne Dietze
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first Barbour historical romance collection I’ve read since they’ve changed the format to just four novellas per book. While the collections have always been written around a theme, “Cameo Courtships” takes that to a whole new level. All four stories are about a single family and a special cameo that gets handed down through the generations. The authors did a bang-up job of coordinating their stories and it reads almost like one long novel. It was hard to pick a favorite, but since I always do, I’ll go with “Taming Petra” by Jennifer Uhlarik because I loved “Buckskin Pete.”
The Refuge by Ann H. Gabhart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m a huge fan of Ann Gabhart’s Shaker books. I’ve liked them all. This one, however, might be my favorite. Ann does a great job of making the Shakers real in her stories. It would be so easy to make them cartoonish with their odd beliefs and odder ways, but she handles them with dignity and delicacy while showcasing their stories realistically.
This is historical fiction – not historical romance – but there is an undercurrent of a romantic thread in it which is touching. The Shakers believed that marriage was a sin. Yeah, I know, but they did. So the romance is all the sweeter for that background.
I enjoyed the movement and flow of the different points of view, including the young girl, Leatrice. It takes talent and attention to detail to write a child’s point of view well. Ann does. Her characters aren’t perfect (but then, who is?), but they are so realistic that you’ll be comfortable with them in minutes and involved in their lives before you even realize it.
You don’t need to have read any of Ann’s other Shaker stories to enjoy this one. But you may want to read them after!
Pegg Thomas