How the Light Gets In
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Compellingly woven by Jolina Petersheim's capable pen, How the Light Gets In follows a trail of grief toward healing, leading to an impossible choice—what is best when every path will hurt someone?" —Lisa Wingate, New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours
From the highly acclaimed author of The Outcast and The Alliance comes an engrossing novel about marriage and motherhood, loss and moving on.
When Ruth Neufeld's husband and father-in-law are killed working for a relief organization overseas, she travels to Wisconsin with her young daughters and mother-in-law Mabel to bury her husband. She hopes the Mennonite community will be a quiet place to grieve and piece together next steps.
Ruth and her family are welcomed by Elam, her husband's cousin, who invites them to stay at his cranberry farm through the harvest. Sifting through fields of berries and memories of a marriage that was broken long before her husband died, Ruth finds solace in the beauty of the land and healing through hard work and budding friendship. She also encounters the possibility of new love with Elam, whose gentle encouragement awakens hopes and dreams she thought she'd lost forever.
But an unexpected twist threatens to unseat the happy ending Ruth is about to write for herself. On the precipice of a fresh start and a new marriage, Ruth must make an impossible decision: which path to choose if her husband isn't dead after all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Petersheim (The Alliance) constructs a rich story about grief, the dying of love, and the rekindling of faith. After Ruth's husband, Chandler, is killed during a hospital bombing in Afghanistan, she and her two daughters, two-year-old Vivienne and six-year-old Sofie, take his ashes to the Wisconsin Mennonite community where he grew up. Elam, her husband's cousin, invites them to stay at his cranberry farm for the harvest, and Ruth agrees to work in the cranberry bog. She is melancholic, but her sadness is mainly for her daughters; she finds it hard to grieve for a husband she feels she had already lost. Ruth and Chandler had been married for five years, and they adopted Sofie shortly after their marriage. Chandler, a doctor, had been away for most of his children's lives and, slowly, Chandler and Ruth's love turned to distant communication and bitterness. During Ruth and her daughters' stay with the Mennonite community, Ruth's relationship with her grieving mother-in-law strengthens, and she nurtures a friendship with Elam. Then a phone call makes Ruth question whether Chandler is dead after all. With skillful plotting and vibrant characters, Petersheim reveals the pain of loss and the healing that comes from mercy and forgiveness.
