Janette Oke - Love Comes Softly

...you don't always hear the knock.

This book was given to me years ago by my godmother, but I never read it until a couple of nights ago. I read it for comfort after choking forth several sweaty, tearful prayers. I'd just found out that the man I was involved with "forgot" to mention he had a wife! (It's a LONG story.) Anyway, I picked up this novel and couldn't put it down! As with the last book I reviewed, Christy, I found myself transported to the past once more...

Imagine this scenario. You're fighting against circumstances beyond your control. You were traveling West in a covered wagon in the 1880's with the young husband you're madly in love with. When the wheel breaks, hubby goes for help. He's thrown off his horse and killed, to your horror and heartbreak. To make matters worse, you're pregnant with his baby.

And thus begins Love Comes Softly, the first in an eight book series written by Janette Oke. The grieving widow is Martha "Marty" Clarige, who is only nineteen years old. Just after Clem is buried on "borrowed land", she retreats to her wagon in stunned, numb grief. Marty has no money, no land and no kin nearby to help her out. Just then a large man seeks out Marty at the wagon. He is Clark Davis, a young widower with an infant daughter. Clark tells Marty that the visiting preacher will be leaving town later in the day. If we marry, he tells her, I will provide you with a home, clothes and food if you will be a mama to my Missie. I won't ask you for anything more. We have to marry today.

Marty is furious at this man and his proposition, but she can't turn him down. She has not a penny to her name, so she agrees. After the simple, loveless ceremony, Clark says something that cheers Marty up a bit. The next wagon train heading east will be coming by the next spring. I promise I will give you money and your freedom to go to your kinfolk back east, but only if you take my Missie with you. She needs a mama, Clark informs Marty.

And thus, Marty is shown her bedroom, which she will share not with her in-name-only husband, but with her new stepdaughter, Melissa ("Missie"). Missie is a happy two-year-old with dark curls and apple cheeks, and is the light of her daddy's life. Marty gets off on the wrong foot with Missie right away, when Missie won't let her new mama dress her. Things only get worse that day, with one hilarious calamity following another.

What stuns Marty about her "cold, heartless" husband is that he has a God, one outside church! Before each morning's breakfast of pancakes and coffee, he says the prayers and reads a passage of Scripture. Then it's off to face the day's chores on his farm. Growing up in a home with a father who drank and cursed, Marty doesn't know what to make of this. Hating Clark and the cruel hand life has played on her, she cries herself to sleep every night and only focuses on her grief. It never occurs to her that Clark feels the exact same way.

Things do look up once Marty meets the neighbors the Grahams, with Ma Graham becoming her confidante and closest friend. It is through Ma that Marty learns the story of Clark's late wife and Missie's mother, and how another happy marriage had ended in sorrow...and little by little the animosity she has against Clark and their situation lessens.

I won't give anything else away (outright), but I will say this is one of the best love stories I've ever read. I also appreciate Marty's curiousity and puzzlement about God and the Bible, and the way she resolves it. The way this unusual family grows and works together is truly something to behold.

Even if you are not Christian, this book does not beat you over the head with religion. I think anyone who loves romance, historical fiction and/or just clean entertainment suitable for the whole family, will find that Love Comes Softly is an all around winner. With two strong yet vulnerable, lovable yet exasperating (and completely human and real) protagonists, colorful supporting characters, humor, drama and much more, you'll be wanting more! (I've also read the second book, Love's Enduring Promise, and will review it here soon.)