When Hope Blossoms
Amy Knackstedt hopes a new start in Weaverly, Kansas, will help heal the pain of losing her husband and provide a better future for her three children. But her new neighbor, Tim Roper, is not pleased to have an Old Order Mennonite family living next to his apple orchard. Tim left the Mennonite faith years ago and doesn’t want any reminders of his former life.
Yet when circumstances throw Amy and Tim together, they form a friendship that surprises them both. Will past hurts always be a barrier between them, or will this tentative relationship blossom into something more?
Reviews
It is very important to know where you belong. In this novel by Kim Vogel Sawyer, the reader meets Amy Knackstedt, devoted Mennonite, when she is showing their new home to her three children, Bekah (13), Parker (11) and Adrianna (5). Amy is a widow, and the desire to escape painful memories and speculations about her husband’s death is the main motive of her move from her birth city, Arborville, to another small Kansas city, Weaverly. Thirty-three years old, Amy hopes for a better future. She believes that here, with God’s providence, her wounds would be healed and Weaverly would become for her and her children a promised land. However, she is about to lose the house and her small quilt business if it isn’t proven that her husband’s death was not a suicide but an accident.
You need to read the entire book to find out if Amy’s hopes come true, how it happens, and what role in all this 37-year-old handsome Tim Roper (also a widower, a former Mennonite and Amy’s closest neighbor) plays.
Galina Roizman
Portland Book Reviews, August 2012
It is very important to know where you belong. In this novel by Kim Vogel Sawyer, the reader meets Amy Knackstedt, devoted Mennonite, when she is showing their new home to her three children, Bekah (13), Parker (11) and Mennonite Amy Knackstedt tries to escape the gossip surrounding her husband’s death by moving her children to a small town in Kansas. Her new neighbor, former Mennonite Tim Roper, is not pleased, but he can’t avoid Amy’s children, who try their best to befriend him.
Library Journal
Kim Vogel Sawyer’s well-crafted novel is a touching story of emotional healing, restoration, romance, and new beginnings, creatively blended with life lessons learned on God’s good plan for us in hard situations and how He strengthens us to get up again when life knocks us down.
Nancy Kanofani
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