Tome Thursday: Where Trust Lies

Hello everyone!

I've been so busy these past couple of days I almost forgot I'm supposed to throw a book blog up tonight. Let me tell you, this whole daylight saving time threw me for a loop because I'm consistently bad at trying to stay awake long or even just getting out of bed in the morning. They should absolutely just erase this from existence. Why do we need it again?!

I'm reading quite a bunch of things at the moment, mostly because I can't really stick to one book only - yeah, tell me about it - and I've also been trying to watch some movies I'm behind with, which isn't quite working either.

But.

I luckily have some stuff to fall back on when desperate times call for desperate measures, and of course one of these are my book reviews from when I was actually doing them diligently enough back in the day.

So because I needed something fairly easygoing, I picked Where Trust Lies.

This is the second in the Return to the Canadian West series by Janette Oke and her daughter, inspired by the Hallmark Channel television series of the same name as the original Canadian West novel, When Calls the Heart.

I wrote a review on the first book already, by the way, and you can find it here. In short, however: Beth, the school teacher, has chosen her profession and the man of her heart, but at the end of the book she is returning to her own home since she has no idea whether she will be reinstated as teacher in Coal Valley.

This is where our second book begins, as she arrives at the station - rose petals from Jack in tow - to be greeted enthusiastically by her family.

All at once, the differences between Beth and her family come to the front as she has now learned to do with a lot less in life and appreciate other things more than simply money, while her well to do family doesn't seem to quite understand her passion for teaching or her desire to return to the town where she has previously spent her year. On top of that, where Beth had been planning a quiet summer at home, she finds out that she is instead going on a cruise with her mother and sisters.

This complicates things a little in her courtship with Jack, as they had promised to call and write to each other, but they both agree to keep trying to make it work, and do stay in communication throughout the trip quite frequently for those times, might I say.

The ladies are joined on the trip by a business partner of the Thatcher patriach, so that protection side is covered, but tensions arise as the eldest, Margaret, is unhappy with how her current nanny is treating her son, and Julie wants more independence and freedom than her mother will allow. This intensifies when the sisters meet Nick, a handsome young man and his two female companions who seem to be worldly and all around friendly and capable. Julie is instantly smitten, whereas her older sisters are certainly more on the wary side.

Disaster doesn't strike until they reach New York, however: Julie, more and more impossible during the cruise, becomes downright unmanageable in the big city, and literally gets kidnapped before Beth's eyes because she insists on accompanying Nick when she shouldn't, while Beth stands her ground.

A ransom demand is made, and the police are notified, while the malefolk converge to the Big Apple to be there for their women. This, to Beth's surprise, includes Jack, because he decided that being there for her was more important than staying at his outpost. As he had previously explained to her that he intends to ask for her hand in marriage, this doesn't come as such a surprise to the readers though, only to Beth, who is a little bit oblivious.

Eventually, Nick calls with important information because he feels guilty, which leads them to Julie and to a safe closure of the situation.

The book ends with Beth receiving the teaching position in Coal Valley again, but being unsure whether she should take it, as at the same time she has also told Jack (after pushing him away at first but eventually the two have a heart to heart) that she wants to marry him.

Yet another of those simple, delightful novels to read where you don't have to bang your head against the wall, and these books are always so relaxing to me. I can't wait to get my hand on the third one, because I want to know if this Beth and Jack get around to marrying faster than the TV show ones! I have first world problems, I admit.

If you haven't started these books yet, I strongly recommend them, you won't be sorry!

xx

*image not mine