Today we have a double header! My list has grown so much that this is going to happen sometimes…Usually when one is a book that I didn’t love. That way we get to end on a positive note!
Love’s Enduring Promise by Janette Oke (1980) is a religious romance story set in the “Pioneer Times”. Second in the series.
Pioneer woman Marty lives life on a farm, raises children, and has faith.
Who Recommended this book?
My friend Amy Emmett is another CERT squad-leader in Team 3. She raises sheep, is a HAM, and a country music DJ at the local radio station. Occasionally we get to be “survivors” at the CERT academy together.
Did I enjoy this book?
Well, no. Not this read through. This was Sally age 11 or 12 reading material, along with Gilbert Morris, Bodie Theonie, and other Christian fiction authors at the time.
I’ll be honest, book 2 was probably not the best choice to grab, but the used bookstore didn’t have the first in the series. The first book follows Marty and Clark as they fall in love after getting married—after their spouses die. This book covers the next twenty years maybe?
The writing isn’t terrible by any stretch—although the dialect is painfully generic “old timey ignorant”—but the fundamentals of plot are lost in the Little House on the Prairie genre style the book is emulating.
I’m not going to shy away from spoilers here since there isn’t a lot of tension to begin with. The book opens with Marty hoping that the school gets built and they find a teacher. The school then gets built and everyone has a nice time. Then a year passes—in maybe 10 pages?—and they find a teacher.
This is the formula for the rest of the book. Something happens, they pray, it turns out okay. Weird theology aside—and there is a lot of it to set aside—this plot structure doesn’t create any narrative tension; it’s kind of like reading a really long children’s book? There also isn’t a recognizable A and B plot, just things that happen.
Sometimes there are mini arcs, like in a long episode tv show: A neighbor woman is sick and wants her girls to get a good education but the husband doesn’t. Woman dies after Marty leads her to Jesus and promises to look after her girls; Marty and her husband do a lot of praying; the girls get to live with them. There is a similar arc with a neighbor woman who has a special needs kid.
The first half of the book takes place over a couple years, then suddenly the second half rockets off and sometimes five years passes in a single chapter. If I remember correctly, the next few books in the series follow Marty’s kids, so this could be a set up for all of that? Still, the last half feels mostly like exposition rather than story.
Not once in the book did it tell me where in the “West” the story was taking place. The setting was vague. There was timber for buildings, fields for planting, and rolling hills. No one had trouble with crops, and animals, or weather issues. The only specific time notation was a mention of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, so post 1852. Wagon trains passed through the town occasionally, but there was no train, so somewhere along the Oregon trail before the 1880’s is my guess.
The characters were flat. All of them. Marty gets angry and easily frustrated a few times but there is no growth arc, just a flaw that pops up now and then and doesn’t have lasting effects. Clark is wise, caring, strong, and just manly enough; the epitome of Fundie dream guy.
There were the expected problematic storylines, which I won’t give a lot of page time, but perhaps the most baffling issue I had with this read through was the description of Marty’s birthing episode. It’s her second kid. She’s having contractions and her husband runs off to get the doctor. Doctor and midwife show up and are puttering around, then everything gets fuzzy and next thing she knows they’re putting her baby in her arms.
Now. I’ve given birth seven times, each a wildly different experience, and none of them went down like that. I get it, the author wants this to be a kid friendly book, but let’s not set people up for that sort of expectation!
Birthing aside, the history in this historical fiction felt like salt on a diabetic’s plate.
I read the book, but not joyfully, and I won’t be doing a reread of the series.
Who would I recommend this to?
Anyone who likes Christian fiction as a genre. Like I mentioned above, this isn’t badly written for the genre. No-one is going to be scandalized by a character’s behavior. It is a 1 on the spice meter due to some gentle hair stroking by the husband and maybe a forehead kiss? I do believe there are a couple excited front hugs by an engaged couple.
This is a book I wouldn’t hesitate handing to any one of my kids, although we would definitely be discussing the lack of minority characters except for the token Indigenous person who almost marries a white guy until her grandpa stops it and he marries a tiny blonde instead and lives happily ever after.
Writing Prompt: Write a scene involving prayer AND character development.
Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty is a murder mystery on a spaceship crewed by five clones and an AI pilot.
Who Recommended this? Hannah Keefer, whom I met in a Facebook group dedicated to a podcast about 90’s Evangelical pop culture. She co-hosts a podcast of her own, Somebody Write This, as well as teaches middle school drama. She is smart and capable!
What did I think of this book?
I enjoyed it. I did. The perspective and time shifts were a great way of unraveling the mystery and the twist-ish climax was not surprising exactly, but handled well.
The characters were mostly well developed, though there were almost three levels of developed? The central protagonist, two of the crew member, then the other three. The other three were the more interesting of the group so it was sad to get so little of them in the central plot.
The plot itself was fairly simple, but again, the disrupted timeline and the fact that none of the characters had initial memories of the murders make for a great unraveling. The author expects a lot from her readers in the first 1/3-1/2 of the book however, as there are a lot of random puzzle pieces thrown into the center of the table before the edges are in place. This does make it difficult to emotionally latch on to the story or “get to know” the characters. The second half of the book becomes far more character driven and the whole thing picks up steam from there.
Did I love the world? Meh. It was well written, but it didn’t scaffold the antagonist’s motivations at all which left me skeptical about much of the premise. That said, I could set that aside and appreciate how well things fit together in the end, regardless of the “why”.
Who would I recommend this to?
Someone who really enjoys speculative future fiction, and murder mysteries. I admit there aren’t many of these folks in my friend groups, and I haven’t read enough of this genre to know if this is the best of the best, but I’m glad to have it at the ready if someone asks.
Lots of violence and gore.
No sex, though some nudity but nothing explicit—they wake up in amnio vats naked.
Brief descriptions of physical child abuse.
Lots of ablism in the culture of the world. But also good representation of a character with physical deformities.
Good racial diversity.
Writing Prompt: A character wakes up with no memory of what happened in the (fill in time length of your choice) and have 24 hours to figure out what happened…
Mamasquatch the Writer 
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