The Harvest

Rating:
Summary: Gail Gaymer Martin the only good author in the book
Review: This is a two story holiday(Thanksgiving) inspirational release.The story by Gail Gaymer Martin is ok--not her best, but it is hard to develop a plot and characters in such a short story. The only thing I didn't really like about her story was about how quick the heroine jumped to conclusions about the fact that her new boyfriend appeared to be still involved with his ex-fiancee. I realize that the heroine was supposed to have "hang-ups" about trusting men, but this "big mis-understanding" part of the plot seemed to be a bit contrived. It wasn't as if she and the hero had really made any committment and she kind of played the "drama queen" role. Other than that, it was a pleasant little story.
The second story, by Cynthia Rutledge, was horrible, and I tossed the book into the trash after reading it. This story is in a Love Inspired book, which is supposed to be "clean" Christian romance. I realize that some Christians approve of drinking alcohol while others don't. That's fine--the problem I had with this book is that I think it would be better to leave the mention of alcohol out since that way it wouldn't offend anyone. Alcohol use was mentioned several times, and at one point the aunt asks the hero if "had been drinking" because of how he was behaving and he said "only a couple of drinks." It just didn't fit in with what was supposed to be an inspirational story. The author hinted at the hero's past sexual exploits, and never explained how he dealt with them given his falling in love with the heroine, a virgin. The heroine let herself get too attached to the hero before she knew he was a Christian. I felt like the book was just a run-of-the-mill secular romance with a couple of references to God and church thrown in to turn it into an "inspirational romance." Steeple Hill publishes some great inspirational romances in this series. This just wasn't one of them.