Blogging for Books Review: The Harvest of Grace: An Ada's House Novel by Cindy Woodsmall

Sylvia Fisher is not an ordinary Amish woman. She prefers hard work, milking cows, and tending to her family's dairy herd to managing a household, tending to small children, and participating in other more feminine duties as most Amish women. When she is forced by betrayal, scandal, and guilt to leave her home and beloved family farm she chooses to help another family try to rescue their dilapidated farm. In the process she falls in love with the farm, her work there, and adopts the couple who own the farm as her surrogate parents. Her hope to help the farm turn a profit is shattered when the couple's son and only living child, Aaron Blank, returns and announces that his parents should sell the farm and move to a nearby community where he plans to run an appliance shop for Plain folk. Sylvia and Aaron spend the summer working side by side toward the same goal, ridding the farm of debt, but for different reasons. While Sylvia struggles to accept God's grace and forgiveness, Aaron struggles with temptations of his own and battles to make his parents see the changes he has made in his life. Although Sylvia and Aaron both work against the goal of the other, they work together to bring the farm to prosperity, and to help each other find their path toward peace, living in God's grace, and in harmony with their community.

The Harvest of Grace is the third in the Ada's House Novel series by Cindy Woodsmall. It is comprised of forty chapters in 344 pages. The author offers an introduction to the Ada's House Novels series in the beginning of this book so that readers do not need to have read the previous novels in the series to follow the events and characters of The Harvest of Grace.

This book is an excellent piece of fiction that allows readers to feel more than just self-indulgent while ravenously turning its pages but also allows readers to learn and self-reflect while contemplating the situations, attitudes, and feelings of the characters within the story. Cindy Woodsmall expertly blends jealousy, betrayal, heartache, and anger with forgiveness, faith, love, and grace. Her grasp of the Christian faith, and specifically Amish beliefs regarding forgiveness and grace, allow readers to examine their own spiritual walk and faith. The everyday circumstances faced by her characters allows readers to consider their own faith, walk with Christ, and how they might react in similar situations.

Although the main characters of this novel are Sylvia Fisher, Aaron Blank, and their immediate families, the author nearly seamlessly weaves the stories of several other individuals in the community into the story as well. For readers of the Ada's House Novel series the transitions would be very easy to follow, but for readers who have not experienced the other books in the series the transitions may prove to be more difficult to discern.

The primary characters in this work are well developed, likable, and interesting. The author carefully discloses information about the characters in such a way to leave the reader eager to read more and anticipate the actions and choices of the characters. However, the relationships between the primary and secondary characters sometimes seem underdeveloped and lacking. This is probably not a concern for readers of the entire series, but for readers of this novel exclusively it can cause some hindrance in piecing the intertwining stories together.

This work also offers readers a glimpse into the lives of men and women following the ways of the Old Amish Order in modern times. The author uses her unique knowledge of the Old Amish Order as well as extensive personal research and utilization of a consultant within the Order to assure that her stories are culturally accurate. (Watch a video on this here.) Her style of writing allows readers to imagine that the events within the story could have happened a year ago as easily as they could happen tomorrow.

Overall this is an excellent novel for readers looking for something that can be enjoyable, simple to follow, and informative. Woodsmall gives readers the opportunity to indulge in a good fiction story as well as get lost in it's pages (and isn't that why most people choose fiction?!) Her sentence structure, word mastery, and the ease with which she weaves together the stories of her primary characters make this book easy to read but her capacity for story-telling make it difficult to put down.

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I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review.