I enjoyed this book, but I have to admit that while I felt tremendous sympathy for Angel for much of the book, I also felt frustrated with her. I think it was because Rivers drug out Angel's resistance to Michael too long. And then once she stopped resisting him, I felt the book fall into a bit of a lull for awhile. But, it was very interesting when she left Michael for the last time.

I can’t tell if this was worse than I thought or what I was expecting

Beautiful!!! hard to even describe, it was one of the first novels i ever read and deeply impacted me and how i saw God the Father.

Life-changing. Everyone should read this...EVERYONE!

Read this a few years ago. Great book!

Francine Rivers has written another absolutely amazing book!!

3.5 rounded down because I felt like the problems were pretty fundamental, and my enjoyment was not deep.

Rivers is, for lack of a better term, a reformed author of what I assume are smutty romance novels. Why do I assume this? Because this Christian Roman novel is still entirely focused on the sexual element of the romance, it just isn’t as explicit.

MC is a high priced prostitute in 1850’s California, but the opening chapter is about how she ended up there. It wasn’t pretty, but I wouldn’t say it was explicit. Though the sexual acts are strongly alluded to through out the book, none are actually described. I think the most explicit is the phrase “had sex” always in a context intended to describe the act as a separate entity from anything emotional.

Michael, the male love interest, put me off from the beginning. He talks an awful lot about love for someone that knows very little about the lady. And it took a long to time to feel like he ever saw her as anything other than a project to be fixed. Im still not sure I ever felt like he matured that way.

I suppose the point was supposed to be that God placed love in his heart, but he sure had a lot of lust going on too, as he makes quite clear. I’m not sure that a marriage in which a semi conscious woman replies “why not” makes this ok. I could have gotten over that if they had ever had rectified it, with any any kind of conversation in which she states she would marry him again or now or whatever, but conversation seems to be lacking.

Look, sex is good, and good sex in marriage is the way it ought to be. But a relationship built solely on physical attraction is weak.

There are a lot of different kinds of love. Physical attraction which has its place. Brotherly love, which we should have for everyone, irrelevant of their station in life. Romantic love, which is deeper than either of those, and includes physical attraction. Then there’s Christlike love. This is like Brotherly love but x10, but involves no ulterior motives. Michael’s love always felt a little selfish to me. He loved her because she was beautiful and God told him to, but no matter his level of self control, he lusted pretty hard. I could have forgiven him if at some point he had realized he had been intent on fixing her, not loving her has she was but he didn’t. He eventually “let her go” but he never realizes he didn’t have a right to force her in the first place.

Complaints aside, I didn’t hate it. Forgiveness and redemption are real. We shouldn’t judge people, whatever their situation, because we really don’t know what took them there, or what keeps them there. Mental cages are just as confining.

I was hesitant to read this, I was afraid it would be cheesy