Karen Butler has a past that won’t leave her alone. Her father was convicted of stealing large quantities of money from his company, and solved the problem by taking his own life. Now Karen feels alone, abandoned, unloved, and betrayed, and feels that she should take her own life as well. Isn’t that how it’s done? But when an attempt to slit her wrists fails, she’s taken in by Mac, her father’s good friend and lawyer, and he helps her mend and recover. But now Karen has nowhere to go. She’s penniless and alone. Her only living relative now is her grandmother, Sophia.
With an old car given to her by Mac, Karen sets off for the Golden T Ranch where her grandmother lives. Her thought: to ingratiate herself with Sophia, inherit the ranch when Sophia dies, and then sell it, to live like a queen the rest of her life. But when she arrives, she discovers that the ranch is in a huge state of disrepair, and seems to have been overtaken by a gang of unruly teenage boys, led by a grown man named Dusty Stoddard who immediately gets under her skin.
As it turns out, Sophia runs the Golden T as a summer camp for at-risk youth, and Dusty is the counselor. All Karen’s dreams of getting rich fly out the window when she sees how poor her grandmother really is, and how much of herself she gives to these boys and to God. At first, Karen resents it, then accepts it, and then finally comes to embrace those things herself, helped right along that path by her attraction for Dusty.
I liked the plot of this book. It touched my heart to think of Sophia taking in these boys and grandmothering them back to life. I liked the journal entries from World War II that were interwoven in the story. I appreciated the spiritual aspect to the tale as well. However, I did feel that part was overdone. It’s enough for me to know that the reader has prayed about their problems and that they feel led to do what they’re doing, but we sometimes go for paragraph upon paragraph of prayer after prayer. As a religious person myself, that’s a good thing, but as a book reviewer, I’d say, let’s bring the plot a little more into the foreground and trust that the reader knows that the characters are trying to do God’s will.
(This book was published in 1999 by Waterbrook Press.)
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