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This Promised Land–clean, inspirational novel
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.”
Night Shift–using heart and brain
Night Shift
by Annelise Ryan
Two books to read. One—a thought provoking theological memoir with an impending book club deadline. The other—a page turner by one of my favorite authors, Annelise Ryan. She really knows how to tell a story. My decision, given this choice, is not hard to guess. As I finished the mystery, Night Shift, I should have been wearing my “one more chapter” sweatshirt because that is what happened, all the way to a surprising and satisfying conclusion.
Whereas Ryan’s Mattie Winston Mystery Series focuses on forensics and pathology, her equally well-written Helping Hands Series is about Hildy, a social worker who is combining her job with the hospital as a social worker with a newly created position where she rides along with local enforcement officers to support both the officers and the citizens they encounter. The upside is that many of her clients overlap; the downside is that the hours are extended with the jobs back to back not really allowing for any kind of normal sleep routines. Hildy has been trained in appropriate protocol to keep her safe, and she follows it. She has three big advantages in her new job. She is smart and is good at noticing clues and making connections that others may not see. She has a trained therapy dog Roscoe who interacts well with people in crisis helping to calm them. Personal traumas as a child and her experiences in the foster care system make her an understanding advocate.
In this mystery, Hildy’s welfare check on a farmer yields unpleasant results that are just the beginning of an intricate plot. Threads include a female vet with PTSD, a schizophrenic young man who hallucinates, two adult daughters of the victim who are not very nice people, and a militia organization.
Hildy is determined, persistent, and very caring. On a personal level, she befriends a young neighbor with autism and initiates a relationship with a bachelor detective who is ready to make changes in his life. On a professional level, she is confronted by her boss at the hospital who was turned down for the law enforcement position Hildy now holds.
Annelise Ryan’s books have some of the characteristics of a cozy mystery, but they have a little edge to them in the crime scene descriptions. They also have characters with more depth to them than the typical cozy mystery. She takes great care to bring the reader along as she supplies background information from the first novel in a natural and organic way. The characters are interesting and show development. The plot is intricate and fast moving. This is a mystery you’ll be thinking about for days as you wonder what adventures lie in store for Hildy in the next book.
I would like to extend my thanks to Netgalley and to Kensington Books for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: 5/5
Category: Mystery
Notes: #2 in the Helping Hands Mystery Series, but excellent as a standalone
Publication: July 28, 2020—Kensington Books
Memorable Lines:
If eyes truly are the windows to the soul, one look at Danny’s makes it clear that reason and sanity have left that particular building. At least for now.
As I follow her in there, it occurs to me that this is a kid who never displays emotion, and that I may have just been played by an eleven-year-old.
The rest of the station employees not only haven’t noticed, but they’ve made no effort whatsoever to maintain the newly cleaned state. I’m surprised I got the job I did with this department because, apparently, being a slob is one of the criteria for working here.
Burning Meredith–police procedural
Burning Meredith
by Elizabeth Gunn
With the interruptions common in daily life, I never finish a book in one sitting, and I rarely complete a book the same day I start it. Burning Meredith was an exception. I did stay up late to finish reading it because it was such a good mystery. Due to its focus on police investigative techniques, it is considered a police procedural by those who like to subdivide the genre.
Burning Meredith centers around a huge forest fire in the south-central Montana mountains, destroying many acres and threatening little Clark’s Fort. If it is possible for a bad thing to be good, then this forest fire was it. The disaster breathed new life into the little weekly Clark’s Fort Guardian and provided opportunities for young, local photo-journalist Stuart Campbell to shine. Not afraid of hard work and familiar with the mountains, he manages to put the Meredith Mountain area on the map nationally.
I like the journalist character, but I truly associate with retired teacher Alice Adams who works for the paper as an editor, initially only a few days a week. As she says, “After thirty-two years of catching kids passing crib notes, you didn’t just stop on a dime. Shouldn’t there be a twelve-step plan for this transition?” She is a respected fixture in the community, as she has taught English and social studies to several generations of Clark’s Fort middle schoolers. She encourages her nephew Stuart in his journalistic efforts, and she provides invaluable assistance in solving the mystery of an unidentified man whose body is found after the fire has been controlled.
There are two major threads to this plot; the author initially shares these in separate chapters as unrelated storylines. The reader gets caught up in the reporting of the fire, and then suddenly there is this other direction that appears like an itch waiting to be scratched. Author Elizabeth Gunn’s writing is excellent in terms of the general plot and how it plays out and also in her turn of phrase. Some of Gunn’s prose is so good that I found myself rereading parts just to enjoy her choice of words, her descriptive excellence, or her metaphors. Many mysteries do not allow for much in the way of character development or they expend too much energy on the characters at the expense of the plot. Gunn hits the mark with her writing style. Her main characters are developed and interesting; her minor characters provide a nice backdrop.
Elizabeth Gunn has two series of police procedurals. Will Burning Meredith begin a new series? I could find no indication that it would or wouldn’t, but my opinion is that this book is a good basis for one.
I would like to extend my thanks to netgalley.com and to Severn House for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: 5/5
Category: Mystery, Police Procedural
Publication: June 1, 2018—Severn House
Memorable Lines:
Like a bonus for a job well done, Clark’s Fort got a second freaky dose of luck. A surprise deflection in the polar vortex brought cold, moist air and a drastic dip in air pressure down across Canada and pouring into Montana.
“As you well know, Clark’s Fort doesn’t generate much news.” “For sure. My street gets so quiet on August afternoons, I swear I can hear the bluebirds planning their trip south.”
She gave him the English teacher look that had brought silence to rooms full of eighth-grade miscreants for a generation.
…when the weather warmed up the country roads became mud-holes even more impassable than the snow-drifts had been. People still had to get around, so they chained up and churned out, making ruts you could lose a spring calf in.
education pathways 