A Tender Hope by Amanda Cabot

The third and last in the Cimarron Creek Trilogy

Cimarron Creek is a small town in Texas where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone's business too or so it seems. I like the town, the main characters have been friendly and kind and fun to read about. This book has helped renew my faith in the "Christian fiction" genre, though that might just be my classification system.

This book features a midwife, a knife-wielding gangster woman, an abandoned, orphaned woman, and, of course, the handsome Ranger. I don't have to tell you what happens, you can probably figure it out. But it provided the right amount of suspense for me to keep me reading and engaged. So I confess, I may have skipped ahead just to make sure everything turned out okay, but....

It also included the story of Aimee, a girl from France, who had traveled all the way to Texas to find someone important to her. That part was also interesting as well as the day to day life stories of the town's residents. I like a book that has a main theme that draws you in and makes you wonder what happens, but I also like a book that shows the ordinary every day along with it.

Another theme of this book might be trust. Thea, the protagonist, finds out that her past life was not at all what she thought it had been and she struggles to trust herself to make a good decision in the future because of that. She has to reckon with her past before she can move forward and I do think that is true in real life as well. Sometimes the past can hold us back out of fear or distrust or whatever, but we have to turn to the One who is in control for His help to move forward.

I enjoyed this book, I enjoyed this whole trilogy and Amanda will remain on the list of authors I like to read. She doesn't have as much depth as some authors, but her writing is very well done.

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