I know I got this through Amazon Kindle when it was free. Not sure beyond that. I'm giving it 4 stars because of how much Scripture and Christian living is in the story. It's a sweet romance (clean) though the part of it that deals with the diaries kind of drops off and you have to infer what happened to Esther by reading between the lines of the last diary entries and a letter that Sophia gets.

Esther must have really loved Mikkel to travel all the way to Denmark with him at 18. I still wonder why they didn't try to escape Denmark either before Germany invaded or after Fritz passed away. Why did Esther not go to Sweden with her neighbors instead of just sending her daughter with them? Certainly she/they could have returned to the U.S. She was a U.S. citizen after all.

It's sad to see how close Esther and Sophia were and how that changed--apparently to the point where Sophia couldn't even show love to Maggie (Esther's daughter) as she should have.

We see how Sophia has changed. I can't remember if that change happened after she became a Christian or for some other reason. We see Dusty finally accept God's forgiveness and forgive himself--we also see him learning to turn things over to God and to wait on God's timing. Karen struggles with believing in God. I think it's a good thing the author shows Karen's struggle with this. Too often fiction glosses over becoming a believer and the struggle some go through prior to getting to that point. I also like that the author does make it a point to show that Jesus died for our sins. One friend has pointed out that many of the youth studies her church chose just assumed people would know why they were supposed to believe instead of leading the students through the steps of who Jesus was and what he did and why. ( )