Finding Hope at Hillside Farm is a sweet and heartwarming story about moving on from past hurts. Ella is an equine therapist, which means she helps her clients deal with their problems by having them work with the horses on her aunt’s farm. The farm also provides her a safe haven from her own trauma — an injury that ended her horse-riding career, and a load of guilt over how she treated her ex-husband. Her quiet life gets overturned, and a second chance at love presents itself, when a young girl Hope and her widower father Harry come into town and Hope falls in love with Ella’s horses.

I had expected this to be more of a romance than it was, so a part of me felt a bit impatient at how long it took for Ella and Harry to finally meet. While the story still did turn out to be romantic, most of the first half focused a lot less on the romance itself and a lot more on the various traumas Ella and Harry have had leading up to their meeting. If you’re looking for a heartwarming romance, you’ll find it here; it’ll just take a while to get moving.

That being said, the story was indeed heartwarming overall. I love the idea of working with horses being therapeutic because their actions basically mirror what they sense from the humans around them. I’ve heard a lot about how therapeutic animals can be for people undergoing stress, but haven’t quite seen it implemented in an actual therapeutic practice as Ella does. So I love the aspects about Ella’s work, and how her love for the farm pushes her to go past her comfort zone. Her discomfort with the things she has to do to save the farm — be interviewed by a reporter, expand her clientele to include children — turn out to be linked to her own past trauma, and I like how tightly Lucas weaves all these seemingly disparate threads together.

Harry was a bit more of an enigmatic character for me — while I felt for his struggles with workaholism and living up to the high parenting standards set by his mother-in-law — his story didn’t quite draw me in as much as Ella’s did until about the halfway mark.

There was a twist that I didn’t expect at Harry and Ella’s first meeting, and to be honest, I initially found it too gimmicky and hated the direction the story was going. However, as the story progressed, this particular plot point grew on me, and I eventually had to admit that it ended up taking the characters further than I expected.

Overall, it’s a lovely and emotional story about moving on and allowing yourself to be happy again. I found it to be more of a family drama than a romance, but I think it still worked, and I liked how Ella’s story arc progressed.

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Thanks to Publisher’s Group Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I don’t know much about Mormon history, so it was interesting to learn about this part of their people’s past. Basically, Mormons in 1888 Utah (not sure about now?) believed that if a man had multiple wives, that would add on blessings for their family and ease their way into heaven. But polygamy was against US law, and so lawmen hunted down and arrested Mormon men with multiple wives. The Glovemaker takes place in a small community called Junction, where two out of its seven families have set up somewhat of an underground railroad to help Mormon men on the run escape the law. It’s the first novel (I think?) I’ve ever read with a Mormon protagonist, and it was fascinating to read about this little-known (to me, at least) bit of history.

The Glovemaker takes on a pretty grim and uncertain period in Mormon history, and even alludes to a major historical event where Mormons were (possibly wrongly?) accused of killing a group of travellers (The Massacre of Mountain Meadows, for anyone interested in learning more). The novel could have gone large and sweeping in scope, detailing the breadth of Mormon experiences as many of them hid, or ran from, the law in order to practice their faith in peace.

Instead, the novel goes small, and becomes incredibly more powerful as a result. The story zooms in on Deborah, a woman whose husband went missing on his last business trip, and her neighbour and friend Nels, who help a stranger on the run. This particular stranger’s arrival is unusual because it happens in winter, when most lawmen do their arrests in better weather, and also because the lawman hunting him appears to have followed him from another state. Things don’t go quite as planned, and the residents of Junction must make difficult choices between doing their moral duty and keeping their loved ones safe.

The entire story takes place within two to three days, and while the action overall was fairly slow, I found myself glued to the page. Deborah and Nels both undergo an intensely emotional journey over those few days, and I was completely and utterly hooked. I love the tension between their personal codes of ethics and their more primal need to survive. Even when I knew what the ‘right’ choices were, I still rooted for these characters and wanted them to do whatever was necessary to keep their community safe.

The Glovemaker is a heartfelt, heart-wrenching, and heart-warmingly intimate page turner. Weisgarber takes us right into the hearts of these characters and compels us to ask ourselves: in their shoes, what would we have done?

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Thank you to Publisher’s Group Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Darkness Rising felt somewhat like the final Hobbit movie in that it’s almost like one long battle scene. The Seers spend most of the book on the run from the authorities who think they’re terrorists until the climactic Final Battle.

I like that the author began the book with a quick summary of the trilogy to date, as it helped remind me of the events so far, but I still found myself struggling to keep up with all the characters. There are so many Seers that apart from the lead twins Jasmine and Jade, and from Eva who has a tragic backstory (in an earlier book, she watched her twin being tortured and killed), it was hard to keep the other Seers distinct, and so really care much about their parts in the Final Battle.

The story also felt long, much longer than 200 pages, and I think it’s because the chapters ended up feeling the same throughout — the Seers find a new hiding place, new baddies appear, there’s more talk about climate change and corrupt politicians, etc.

Now, I love a good environmentalist story, so I really wanted to love this story with its commentary on corrupt and greedy politicians, unjust immigration and refugee policies, racism in social views of terrorism, and so on. The trilogy tackles a LOT of important subjects and with a fantastical spin tailored for young adults.

But it all feels a tad too convoluted. The various themes don’t quite mesh, and the fantasy elements feel less like a fully realized world and more like a vehicle created and manipulated for the themes. For example, late in the book, Jasmine thinks about how the Seers got their powers from the earth, so they can save the planet. Great concept, but not at all the mythology I got from the trilogy. Possibly I missed it, but it mostly felt like the Seers were super powered teenage girls who can fight demons and happened to live in a time when the big bads were using demons to defend their planet-killing activities. There’s also a big reveal at the end about the Toronto mayor Sandra Smith’s motivations, and it’s suitably horrific, but also there was no lead up to it, no “aha” moment as I remembered all the clues that pointed to that being her goal. Instead it just felt random, and so when Jasmine called it “evil beyond Hitler”, the horror felt unearned. Side characters like love interests Raphael and Sam (? the guy who flirted with Jade?) show up near the end but again because they weren’t really interwoven through the story, their significance in the Final Battle feels unearned.

And for all the build up, the Final Battle wasn’t as epic as I’d hoped, and seemed to be resolved really quickly.

It was also much gorier than I expected, but that will possibly appeal to some readers.

And finally, the kitten near the end felt random, but I liked it. 🙂

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TL;DR: Lots of great and important messages, but the story (book and trilogy overall) felt messy.

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Thanks to Dundurn for an egalley in exchange for an honest review.