This Promised Land

By Cathy Gohlke

Although the roots of the story related in This Promised Land date back to 1940, most of the events occur in the early 1990’s. The setting is Wetherill Pickering’s Christmas Tree Farm in New Scrivelsby, Virginia, where the Pickering Family works hard to scrape a living from the land during the Depression. The protagonist is Ginny Dee, retiring from a job in a gardening center in 1992. She has worked hard to achieve an internship in an English garden park. As she prepares to go, she receives a letter from a lawyer, informing her of the death of her estranged brother and asking her to visit him to answer some questions about the land she grew up on.

Her return to New Scrivelsby brings up memories, good and bad, and initiates many questions about her past. Her brother had been lying to her for all of her adult life about their parents and their rejection of her. Meanwhile, Ginny Dee, a childless widow, discovers she has family—two nephews, one with anger problems who is married to a sweet woman and the other an alcoholic with three adorable children who live with him in a truck and fear being returned to foster care. Everyone has an issue, but none of them are bad people. When Ginny Dee meets with the lawyer, she discovers that her overbearing brother had made some extremely bad business decisions and the family is likely to lose the tree farm.

Life becomes even more complicated when the oldest child, Arlo,  wanders into a marijuana plot causing the pot growers to try to accelerate the tree farm’s decline in dangerous ways. There are a lot of twists and turns as the family, and later the community, try to save the farm. A stray dog, Bailey, performs a heroic act and quickly wins a place in the struggling family. This book is hard to put down as the reader wants the family to overcome the odds that are not in their favor—either in finances or relationships.

As the characters work through their various issues, they learn to deal with them by praying and trusting God. There is spiritual growth for both the main characters and others in the community who have their eyes opened to the difficulties of others. They learn to look beyond a person’s history and move past stereotypes. 

I recommend this book for readers who want a clean, inspirational novel with action, interesting characters, and a touch of romance.

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Rating: 5/5

Category: Christian, Fiction, Women’s Fiction

Publication: April 8, 2025—Tyndale House

Memorable Lines:

Ginny loved him, or she’d told herself she did, but sometimes she felt she’d loved the man who went away and not the one who came home. She’d tried to, but he was uncommunicative, broken inside and out, and while some of his body had mended, the healing inside his head had never come, so her healing inside had not come either.

“You see good even where others see trouble.” “It’s not about seeing the good right off. It’s about looking for the good, for the image of God in every person.”

“You need to forgive them,” Aunt Ginny Dee whispered. “They can’t change what they don’t see. God will work in them just like He’s working in each of us… in His time, His way—not ours.”