The Harvest of Grace by Cindy Woodsmall

This book, The Harvest of Grace,  centers around a young Amish woman named Sylvia Fisher.  Sylvia is jilted by the young man who has been courting her....for her younger sister.  And if that's not bad enough, her father gives the house her grandfather left to her to the newly married couple.  As the oldest of nine daughters, Sylvia was very close to her grandfather--who taught her how to build the herd of milk cows and develop the land and crops for those cows.  Sylvia would rather be outside working with the cattle than inside cooking or doing the normal things young Amish women do.  Because of an indiscretion with her sister's husband (and her former boyfriend), Sylvia decides to leave her father's home and move 30 miles away to help a man with his dairy herd.   This man's only child left home months earlier to go to a rehab for his alcohol addiction.

I didn't realize when I started reading this book that it is the third book in this series.  For the most part, I could figure out what was going on.  But there were huge gaps in the book that you wouldn't know what had happened unless you'd read the first two books.    There were two or three story lines of other people's intersecting lives that were followed and several were from the "outside" and not Amish.  Personally, I didn't think the true Amish flavor really came through.  It was very distracting to follow so many non-Amish people when the Amish characters didn't seem all that Amish.   But Cindy Woodsmall is a great story teller.  In fact, I wouldn't put the book down after I began reading and read into the night.

I'd give this book 4 out of 5 stars.

Thank you to WaterBrook Multnomah Publishers for providing this book for review. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255