When the ranch goes bust, Jimmy comes home to find his mother married to Hank Lapp (a man who doesn't know the meaning of inside voice), and to find that his mother wants him to get married to the maedel of her choice. Next door to Edith Lapp lives Sylvie Schrock King, along with her son and her horse Prince. This is the one woman Edith does NOT want Jimmy to marry.
Sylvie meets Jimmy at the Bent and Dent store and offers him a job cleaning up her farm. She is the widow of Jake King who was notorious for hoarding. Jimmy has a lot of work to keep him going for a while and when he finds things worth selling, Sylvie tells him to keep the money for his wages.
Edith is a bit vindictive and quite a bit of a gossip. She refuses to believe Sylvie's son is actually her nephew and she refuses to believe that Jake left her his farm. She tries to cause trouble for Sylvie wherever she goes.
Jimmy is in love with Sylvie and doesn't know how to proceed in courting her. His lack of decisiveness brings Sylvie to move back to her father's house. Jimmy has to learn to court her through letters.
One of my favorite parts of the book is where Jimmy has the old barn completely cleaned out and the walls fall in on each other because Jake's junk was holding up the walls. My dad owned the house where his parents had lived (not a very big house), and he took out the flooring board by board, then he took out half of the studs one at a time. He was working on getting more lumber out of the house when he heard it creaking. He got out and watched the walls fall in on each other. He burned what he could and hired a man with a bulldozer to level the site the house was on.
This is definitely a four star book, and it will be enjoyed by any reader who likes to read Amish fiction.
Revell Publishing and NetGalley.com provided the galley I read for this review. The opinions I expressed are my own.
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