Blog Tour and Review: Scattered Petals

Scattered Petals: A Novel (Texas Dreams) is a Christian Romance, sent to me for review by Donna Hausler at the Baker Publishing Group.  The heroine is Priscilla, a young woman from Boston who was travelling to Texas to attend the wedding of her late sister's husband.  The stagecoach in which she and her mother were traveling was attacked by bandits.  After being robbed, her parents were killed and she was raped.  Before she could be killed, a Texas ranger rescues her and takes her to her brother-in-law's ranch, where she meets Zach, who just happens to have a fair physical resemblance to her attacker (who the Ranger killed).  The touch of any man terrifies her, but as things develop, she needs a husband and he volunteers.

The story is set in the Texas hill country and the settlers of the town are French and German, from Alcase-Lorraine,an area on the French and German border which has changed hand many times over the years.  In this story, though they are in America, the French and German residents mix only a bit, each having their own church.  Intermarriage is unheard of.  That is significant because one of the subplots features a French woman and a German man.  There are also subplots about a bad guy and about the ranger searching for the men who killed Priscilla's parents.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it if you like romances and either like or can handle a rather religious version.  It is a story with very obvious lessons about forgiving enemies and  yourself, and about accepting differences in people.  The characters pray and we go to church with them.  It isn't one of those books where a character has to find God before s/he can live happily ever after, but it isn't one that is simply about Christians either. While there are times we get glimpses of the character's spiritual lives, I wouldn't characterize this book as being about their spiritual lives either.  Rather, the novel is a carrier for the lessons the author wants to teach.

I didn't quite know what to make of the church scenes in the book.  As mentioned before, the town had a French church and a German church.    Wikipedia says that both Catholics and Protestants lived in Alsace-Lorraine. The pastor of the French church was referred to as Pere and once called "Father", making me wonder if he was Catholic.  Despite this, and the fact that the food he served to Priscilla was made by his housekeeper, not his wife, the church scenes described were more Protestant than Catholic.  The pastor picked his own text for the sermon and held a joint Easter sunrise service with the German pastor, neither of which would have happened in real life in a Catholic church at that time.

Grade B-

“Available March 2010 at your favorite bookseller from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group.”