I am excited to talk about a new book by another Bethany House debut author, the lovely Anne Mateer. Wings of a Dream is a wonderfully evocative novel about life on the home front during World War I. Our heroine, Rebekah, is a young woman who longs to escape the vast loneliness of life on the rural Oklahoma prairie. Instead, fate takes her to another isolated farm in Texas, where the Spanish Influenza epidemic is in full force. Rebekah is the only person left to look after four children whose caretakers have all died, and whose father is fighting in France.
Rebekah quickly attracts the attention of a number of lonely bachelors in town, but what about the children’s father, with whom she begins a correspondence while awaiting his return from the war? The reader is never quite certain which suitor will win Rebekah’s hand until well into the novel.
I truly enjoyed this book, as the author captured the sense of loneliness and isolation Rebekah feels as the only adult on a remote farm. At the same time, we see the sense of the community that had been established by the far-flung members of this rural Texas area. In a time when so many of the men were called to serve abroad and other people had been clobbered by a life-threatening epidemic, a network of neighbors, including the postman, the pastor, the sheriff, and others band together to help look out for one another. Nevertheless, on most days Rebekah is terribly alone on the farm with four young children to look after at the same time she needs to keep the farm running, get dinner on the table, and try to help her new neighbors as they battle sickness and despair.
The author managed to pull off quite an accomplishment with this book. She included aspects of high drama (people dropping like flies due to the war and flu) combined with the stark, homespun loneliness of an isolated existence created a unique feel to this novel that I highly recommend. I can’t wait for Anne Mateer’s next book!
You can read Anne Mateer’s blog here.
Comments 1
Thank you, Elizabeth! 🙂