The Promise of Dawn by Lauraine Snelling
This is the first book in a new series called "Under the Northern Skies" and it is definitely a series I want to follow. None of this fluffy romance of boy meets girl in this book, rather it is the conditioned, committed love that carries through the rough and tumble of life, a move across the ocean, an impertinent and aggressive uncle and so on.
We need more books like this. The boy meets girl is the fun stuff of life, but the commitment and sacrifice and courage required to make a marriage work is the stuff of life, the stuff we face every day and it's what our younger people need to read about. A young family uproots from Norway, moves to Minnesota, and is sharing a house with a mean workaholic uncle and his bedridden wife who screams and screeches about everything. The family deals with a lot, but the husband and wife are committed to each other and they stick it out. The aunt does get better under the care of the wife who will not allow her to just lie in bed and she becomes a friend. The uncle? Well, after going to the sheriff about the family, the tables are turned and he forced to make some changes.
I just really liked this book. It's the story of every day life in the hard days of settling the land, cutting trees by hand, cooking on a woodstove, and so on. Things I only have read about and have no idea what it was like. Yet, the commitment required to make relationships work is the same commitment that is required today. And we need more of that.
This book was given me by Bethany House. I was not required to write a positive review. I will be eagerly looking forward to the next book in this series. If anyone has read Lauraine's Red River of the North series, this series is based loosely from that one. I think I read it quite awhile ago and there would be some of the same family lines in it, though not set in the same place.
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