A Hopeful Heart

By Kim Vogel Sawyer
       
Tressa Neill has lived for most of her young life with her aunt and uncle, who are glad to see the back of their penniless niece. Their last gift to her is to send her to the Wyatt Herdsman School in rural Kansas. There she will learn all the skills needed to become the wife of a rancher, and the small town of Barnett has no shortage of single men. Rancher Abel Samms thinks he knows all about Eastern women, and none of it is good. Can Tressa change his mind?

The idea of such a school is a delightful one, and reading about the skills needed to make a rancher’s wife and how six young women tackle them is entertaining. We don’t get to know all six of them however, and I thought that it was a pity that two of them remained mere ciphers as this is not a short novel and there was plenty of room for them in it. This aside, Ms Sawyer paints a very realistic picture of a western town in this period and apart from the school and the romance there is the added mystery of who is rustling Abel’s cattle. Orphan Tressa knows nothing about the Bible, and Abel has turned his back on it after an unhappy affairaffaire; Tressa’s joy in learning of God’s love is palpable and uplifting. There is a lot to take pleasure in here in short, and at the end I felt that there was plenty of material left for another book; not a common feeling which shows that I truly did enjoy it.