Missing Isaac by Valerie Fraser Luesse

This is the Valerie's debut novel. She is an award winning writer and a senior travel editor for Southern Living, so she is very familiar with writing stories.

This was a very well-written book that I did really enjoy. It's hard to find authors that can tell a fascinating story that has a good moral and isn't all roses and kisses and money. However, the title here is a bit misleading, in my opinion.

Isaac is an employee of Jack McLean. Jack died when the tractor he was driving disappeared into a sinkhole. Isaac became a mentor/father figure to Jack until his mysterious disappearance a few years later. The sheriff was a dead beat and really didn't conduct an investigation, but it always bothered Pete as to what happened to Isaac. In a search for him, he stumbled across Dovey, a girl from the hollow, meaning she was poor and their people kept to themselves.

And that is, to me, what the book is really about, a young, fresh-faced friendship/romance between Pete and Dovey. Even though both were white, there was a cultural gap between the two. Pete came from money, Dovey didn't. Yet that didn't bother Pete at all. I liked the fact that the whole McLean family wasn't all uppity about their wealth, but were willing to share it and befriend people who weren't wealthy, but yet were honest, upright, hard working people. Living in the south and being friends with the African-Americans was also a novel concept for most people at that time and that was another area where the McLean family excelled in.

All in all it was a good book, a book about overcoming cultural and racial prejudices, a book about friendships, a book about life and loss. And yes, they did figure out what happened to Isaac in the end.

I received this book from Revell and was not required to write a positive review.