I really like a good prairie story, which I think harkens back to my childhood when my mother read aloud the whole of Laura Ingall Wilder’s repertoire annually. With stories about the frontier you get the sense of solitude and adventure in everyday occurrences that I think we miss out on living in the modern age. Then, it was the rolling wheat fields and your family; beyond those things nothing else mattered except God.  And it was God you had to depend on to make sure that your family and your crops made it through to the next day. The dependence on God and sense of close family ties were always so appealing to me and made the frontier, in my mind, feel a little like home. As far as a frontier Christian novel goes, Lauraine Snelling hits the mark with her newest novel, A Measure of Mercy.

A Measure of Mercy is the first book in the Home to Blessing series but many of the characters appear in the Daughters of Blessings series. While some of the plot is set up in Snelling’s 2008 novel, Rebecca’s Reward, this reader jumped into the plot without any difficulty. Astrid Bjorklund, an 18 year old living in Blessing, North Dakota, dreams of being a doctor and has been lucky enough to receive some preliminary training under the guidance of Dr. Elizabeth, an established doctor in the area. While Astrid wants to continue her training she feels pulled in many directions. Astrid wants to have a family, be a doctor, not see people sick and in pain daily, be a missionary, and stay in Blessing. She has an opportunity to study in Chicago but feels conflicted. Meanwhile, Joshua moves back into town with a load of family issues on his mind, but he knows one thing: he wants to marry Astrid. The characters are well developed and we get to hear each character’s voice.

The conflicts of life, love, and career choices in this novel are realistic to the characters’ era as well as prevelant today. The realistic conflicts make the characters believable. Individuals still feel torn about what career path to choose and consistently feel confused and lost. And who doesn’t feel pressure to get married but confusion about who to marry!? Also, Astrid encounters individuals who think that she can’t be qualified to be a doctor because she is a woman; she faces these acusations with dignity that I wish I could emulate when presented with an antagonistic person. The characters were very well done and the reader felt the pull of internal struggle that each character faces.

My favorite parts of the book were the interactions between doctor and patient. The book was set in a time before antibiotics. Whenever I read a historic novel involving medicine, I am immedately drawn to the methods used in that day and age as well as all the things people believed but have since been proved true. It is just so facinating! I don’t know how anyone stayed alive back them when the sniffles could kill you! The medical scenes in the novel were somewhat gory but not overly so and enhanced the book’s sense of excitement.

This was an entertaining gentle read. Lauraine Snelling, will be at the Main Branch Library on September 10, 2009 at 6 p.m. Registration is not required. If you have any questions please call the library at 270.781.4882.

Kara Ripley is a librarian at the Warren County Public Library in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She earned her BA in English and Philosophy and her Masters in Library Science from Indiana University. Kara lives with her husband Matt, and spends most of her time reading and/or knitting.