Wildflowers from Winter Katie Ganshert Waterbrook Press
For everyone who has to revisit their past choices…and examine their present options…author Katie Ganshert’s debut novel Wildflowers from Winter offers depth to real-life issues, as her characters explore hard-hitting questions.
As a young architect at a prestigious Chicago firm, Bethany Quinn has built the life she only dreamed about while growing up as a trailer park teen. Now miles away from her memories, an unexpected phone call from her estranged mother reveals a hometown tragedy; the husband of her best friend, Robin, died unexpectedly.
Bethany’s plans are simple: go home to the small Iowa town for a few days; pay her respects to Robin; visit her beloved grandfather; avoid her mother at all costs. However, as the poet Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” As her character Bethany reluctantly returns to her hometown, struggles with her faith, finds her way through grief, and examines new possibilities in life, she’s called to make peace with her past, along with her misconceptions of God.
Katie Ganshert shows promise as a novelist in Wildflowers from Winter. She made the wise decision to set her novel in an area she’s familiar with, having grown up in the Midwest. Her descriptions make me want to put Iowa on my list of places to visit. The book is a quick-read, the story intriguing, and her characters fully-fleshed. She has no problem dropping her characters in the midst of serious situations and leaving them there to suffer. She also has no qualms about presenting questions and struggles that people – both believers and unbelievers - have with God and the Church. There are a few potholes in the plot and the resolution is rather obvious, but that can be attributed to the title and the genre.
If you love Christian romance novels, you will want to put Wildflowers from Winteron your to-read list. Should you fall in love with Ganshert’s story, don’t despair; the sequel, Wishing on Willows is scheduled to release in 2013.
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