Title: The Harvest of Grace (An Ada’s House Novel, Book 3)
Author: Cindy Woodsmall
Publisher: Waterbrook Press
Date: Aug 2011
ISBN: 978-1400073986
Genre: Contemporary Amish
Reviewed by: Laura V. Hilton
Sylvia Fisher loves Elam, but she isn’t sure she wants to marry when Elam thinks they should. She’s taken over her dad’s dairy cow business, which is beginning to show a profit. Elam wants to marry in the fall and has already signed a business agreement with Sylvia’s dad, making him co-owner of their farm. Elam plans for them to live in Sylvia’s grandfather’s house-deeded to her when her grandfather died. Sylvia asks Elam for a few weeks to decide, but then he does the unthinkable and asks Sylvia’s sister, Rachel, to marry him.
Aaron Blank has been in rehab due to his hateful crimes and drunkenness; he basically murdered his own sister. Now he’s sober and returning home to talk his parents into selling out their dairy farm and moving to town, where Aaron has put a down payment on a shop. The first thing Aaron does when he gets home is go out to the cabin on the property to board it up and get rid of his drunken friends who hang out there: He is stunned to find a woman living there, instead!
Sylvia flees her father’s house to get away from Elam’s inappropriate advances after he marries her sister, but her father disowns her because of this decision. She takes a job on the Blank farm, running the dairy business, and begins to turn a profit. But Aaron and Sylvia are at odds. He wants to sell out—but his father, who loves Sylvia as a daughter, refuses to believe Aaron has changed.
The Harvest of Grace is the satisfying conclusion to the best selling An Ada’s House series. The books include characters from other books in the series, so you will want to read them to get the full story. However, a brief synopsis of The Hope of Refuge or The Bridge of Peace is included in this book.
I couldn’t help but feel for Sylvia’s losing everything she held dear to get away from her sister’s husband, and I wish her father would have been more understanding to her plight. Aaron, an absolutely insufferably horrific character from The Bridge of Peace, unbelievably becomes the hero in this book. Cindy Woodsmall does a stellar job of transforming his abominable characteristics (from book 2) into someone you will actually love and root for in The Harvest of Grace. If you like Amish fiction, then you’ll want to read this series. A glossary is included at the back of the book.