Title: Roots of Wood and Stone (Sedgwick County Chronicles)

Author: Amanda Wen

Genre: Time Slip

Publishing Date: Jan 26, 2021

Publisher: Kregel Publications

Length: 304 Pages

Links: Amazon | Goodreads

About the Book:

This historic home holds the keys to their destiny . . . and their hearts

Abandoned at birth, her family roots a mystery, historical museum curator Sloane Kelley has dedicated her life to making sure others know theirs. When a donor drops off a dusty old satchel, she doesn’t expect much from the common artifact . . .until she finds real treasure inside: a nineteenth-century diary. Now she’s on the hunt to find out more.

Garrett Anderson just wanted to clean out his grandmother’s historic but tumbledown farmhouse before selling it to fund her medical care. With her advancing Alzheimer’s, he can’t afford to be sentimental about the family home. But his carefully ordered plan runs up against two formidable obstacles: Sloane, who’s fallen in love with both the diaries and the house, and his own heart, which is irresistibly drawn to Sloane.

A century and a half earlier, motherless Annabelle Collins embarks with her aunt and uncle on the adventure of a lifetime: settling the prairies of Sedgwick County, Kansas. The diaries she left behind paint a portrait of life, loss, and love—and a God who faithfully carries her through it all. Paging through the diaries together takes Sloane and Garrett on a journey they never could have planned, which will change them in ways they never imagined.

This warm, beautifully written split-time novel will resonate with readers looking for stories that reveal the beauty of God’s plan for our lives, and how our actions ripple for generations.

My Review:

If I didn’t already know that this was Amanda Wen’s debut novel before opening up to read, I never would have believed it. This was an incredible novel that sucked me in right from the beginning and held me captive until the very end.

The characters were well developed and were each unique in their own ways to truly make them come to life throughout the pages. I liked that their personalities and reactions to life’s stressors were not all the same and that they really had to get to know each other on deep levels in order to be able to speak each other’s love languages–and in more ways than just romance. The relationships felt real, with all of the ups and downs that come with them.

In a world that’s currently upside down with many currently starving for connection, it certainly made that theme stick out even more than it might have if I’d read it a year ago. This story tackles some tough topics like adoption, loss of loved ones, Alzheimer’s, abandonment, and more. It’s not sugar coated. Instead of allowing the characters to move past the tough stuff, the author makes them go through it, so that they are better able to see the Lord at work in their lives the more they grow and mature through life’s hardships.

For me, I want to feel something when I read, and this one certainly had a whole lot of feels. It didn’t take long for my heart to connect with the characters, but it’s not so easy for me to let them go now that I’ve closed the back cover. I’m thrilled that there will be more coming in this series, and cannot wait to read more from this author. I highly recommend having some tissues handy, but this one is absolutely worth the read.

*I received a copy of this book through I Read With Audra Book Tours. Thoughts and opinions expressed are mine alone.

Rating:

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