“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.
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Summary
From: Rebecca Maney
Book Title: How the Light Gets In
Book Author: Jolina Petersheim
What do you like about this book:
"There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
Ruth Neufield's life has not only cracked, but there is a gaping hole where her future used to be. Travelling to Wisconsin with her two young daughters, she buries her husband's remains alongside those of her father-in-law, after the two were tragically killed in an overseas act of terroism. Settling into a Mennonite community there, Ruth and her widowed mother-in-law try to overcome sadness and grief, while accepting the hospitality of Elam Albrecht, her husband's cousin and a prosperous cranberry farmer.
It's in this quiet little corner of the world that Ruth begins to walk the road of recovery, not only away from the wounds of a disappointing marriage, but towards the hope of a new kind of tomorrow . . . and then it happens. . . . the unthinkable theft of her happiness.
To say that this book bulges with emotional triggers is an understatement, for the unique plot structure leads the reader along a path that seems almost impossible to navigate, and yet too captivating to abandon. And then the light comes in, shining its brightest through all the cracks and broken places. What a stunning story!
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