About the book: God was going to save her marriage, Allison was sure of it. But neither her husband nor her marriage had been saved.
What had become of His promise?
Tony Kavanagh had been Allison's dream-come-true. They were in love within days, engaged within weeks, married and pregnant within a year. Her cup bubbled over with joy . . . but years later, that joy had been extinguished by unexpected trials.
The day Allison issued her husband an ultimatum, she thought it might save him. She never expected he would actually leave. She was certain God had promised to heal; it was clear that she'd misunderstood.
Now, living in the quiet mountain cabin she inherited from her single, self-reliant Great Aunt Emma, Allison must come to terms with her grief and figure out how to adapt to small town life. But when she finds a wedding dress and a collection of journals in Emma's attic, a portrait of her aunt emerges that takes Allison completely by surprise: a portrait of a heartbroken woman surprisingly like herself.
As Allison reads the incredible story of Emma's life in the 1920s and 1930s, she is forced to ask a difficult question: Does she really surrender every piece of her life to the Lord?
Drawing from her own heart-wrenching story of redemption, A Promise Kept is Robin Lee Hatcher's emotionally charged thanksgiving to a God who answers prayers---in His own time and His own ways.
Purchase a copy: http://ow.ly/sK3Ti
Meet the author: Robin is the author of 65+ novels and novellas. Her home is in Idaho, where she spends her time writing stories of faith, courage, and love; pondering the things of God; and loving her family and friends.Learn more about Robin at: http://www.robinleehatcher.com
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My thoughts: I love books where the characters find letters or diaries or journals of some sort that give them a window into the past. It is so easy to think that our lives are so different now than they were fifty or one hundred years ago, but that often is not the case. Many times we are struggling with or enjoying the same things. Technology may change, but people are the same and have been looking for the same thing for many years. We all want to belong to a family where we feel loved and secure, to have strong relationships, to have a calling that we enjoy and are able to contribute with and to be appreciated. Allison is adrift after the end of her marriage. She believed that her ultimatum to her husband would save him, but instead he walked away and ended their marriage. Instead of taking their family house away from him, she gave him the house in the divorce and has moved into a cabin in a small town a hour or more away.
The small community of Kings Meadow accepts Allison unconditionally. She makes some really good friends and starts to heal as well by long walks in the woods surrounding her new home with her new dog, Gizmo. Luckily her work as a graphic designer allows her to work from her new, remote location.
By joining a new church community Allison makes even more friends and connections and comes to terms with the end of her marriage. One of the things she greatly looks forward to are visits from her daughter, who has relocated from Idaho since graduating from college fro a job in Texas. Meredith is angry with her father for walking away from her mother, but slowly she reconnects with him and encourages her mother to spend time with him as well.
While working through her own hurts and disappointments, Allison discovers a wedding dress her great aunt saved, along with many photographs and a whole stack of diaries. After putting the diaries in chronological order, Allison starts reading them at the beginning and finds a whole new picture of her independent great-aunt. She resists the urge to skip ahead to find out what happened and makes herself stay with her aunts story chronologically. Seeing her aunt work through heart ache and disappointments that she never knew about opens her up to the struggles so many people face, but don't always share with others, even those they are close to. We all have our own path to walk and we need to trust that we are being guided as we should be, even when things don't go the way we hoped or planned.
One passage that really stayed with me through the book was a conversation Allison has with a rancher. He tells her at one point, when he was younger, he prayed to God for a certain job, and while he was disappointed at the time when the job did not pan out, he thanks God every day that He knew the right plan for him because the job would have taken him away from the community and he is so thankful that he was able to stay and allow his family to grow right where they were. Even though he wanted a different outcome, God knew the big picture and guided him down the path that made it all happen.
Thanks so much for hosting A Promise Kept on your blog. I'm delighted you enjoyed it.
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