“Until the Dawn” is the sequel to the LDS historical fiction novel “Autumn Sky,” both written by Gale Sears. This book serves as the bridge between “Autumn Sky” and the third book in the trilogy, “Upon the Mountains,” which was a finalist for the Whitney Award this last year.
As we begin “Until the Dawn,” we find that we are picking up right where “Autumn Sky” left off. In a desperate bid to save her family’s farm, Alaina Lund married Nephi Erickson in the hopes that her mother would give Nephi the land. But her mother, crazy with grief over the loss of her father, sells the land out from under them, making Alaina’s marriage of convenience completely unnecessary, and yet it’s already taken place. Now with the farm sold and nowhere to go, Alaina goes to Salt Lake City to live with Nephi’s mother, a sweet woman who takes Alaina to heart, even though she’s not Mormon.
Alaina’s mother takes her sisters and moves out to San Francisco to live with her own sister in the kind of life she was used to before her marriage—servants, wealth, social standing. She wants to raise her daughters to this type of life, and in fact, she hated the years Alaina spent working in the orchards, because it kept her from being a true lady.
Eleanor, Alaina’s younger sister, isn’t all that interested in being a true lady. She wants to get down to work and keep busy. She wants to make a difference in the world. When she becomes an advocate for social justice and goes down into the slums to help the poor and downtrodden, she’s thrown out of the house, and comes to Salt Lake City to be with Alaina.
Alaina, meanwhile, hates what she’s done to Nephi. She asked him to marry her on the grounds that he’d have a farm after the marriage, and she is sure he must feel burdened by her. But they both come to realize that their relationship is more than just convenient—they truly do love each other, under all their pretending that they don’t.
As with “Autumn Sky,” I did find the dream sequences to be confusing, but I liked the story and the way Sears took the characters through history without it seeming like a textbook.
(This book was published in 2006 by Covenant.)
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