Love's Enduring Promise by Janette Oke

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the second in the Love Comes Softly series. Clark and Marty continue to add to their family by taking in the two Larson girls as well as their own Ellie and Luke. In this story, the children are growing up and beginning to make their own lives as Clark and Marty help to build up their community by adding a school and church, as well as a teacher and preacher. Clark builds a large new house, Clae Larson goes to normal school to become a teacher, Missie grows up and follows in Clae's path to normal school, and the young people begin to pair up and marry. This is another tender, touching story of life on the prairies.


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Love Comes Softly by Janette Oke

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This series was recommended to me by a friend at work who loaned me her first three books to read. Marty is a young woman on her way out west with her husband Clem to claim and settle on the land there, when her husband meets with a tragic accident that claims his life and leaves Marty alone and bereft with a baby on the way and nothing to her name other than a few personal items from their broken-down covered wagon. Along comes a young man with an offer that she marry him and come to live in his house to care for his motherless daughter, Missie. Marty realizes that she has very few options and accepts his offer in spite of her pain at losing her young husband. The story continues as Marty learns to keep house and cook and care for the little girl. This story reminds me of the Little House books and was a beautiful story of how loss can be overcome and how much people depended on each other in the early days in the prairies. The only thing that I didn't like about the book was tripping over the colloquial speech patterns of the characters - while probably accurate to the times, they slowed down my reading as I tried to make sense of them.


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The Host: A Novel by Stephenie Meyer

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Melanie is one of the few humans left on Earth who has not been taken over by an alien life form. She is in Chicago, searching for relatives that she believes are hiding there, when the Seekers close in on her. Rather than be taken, she tries to kill herself by jumping down an elevator shaft. Unfortunately for Melanie, the aliens have much more advanced medicine and are easily able to heal her body's injuries and insert an alien life form inside her body. Will Melanie just fade away? Why is the alien life form called Wanderer? Can they learn to exist together in one body? These are the questions that can be answered if you read this story by Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight series. And like the Twilight books were more about relationships than vampires, The Host is more about relationships than aliens. I enjoyed this book, but not much as I loved the Twilight saga.


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