Love's Unending Legacy (2004)

Do You like book Love's Unending Legacy (2004)?

Fifth in the "Love Comes Softly" series about a family in the pioneer days in the USA. In this book, Marty and Clark return from their long visit out west to see Missie and family, after a terrible accident that left Clark with only one leg. Marty takes a long time to recover from the journey, prompting her family to worry about her. Meanwhile, their son Clare and his wife Kate anticipate the birth of their first baby, and their youngest son Luke prepares to leave for medical college. Only Ellie is left at home, and when Ellie falls in love she can't imagine how she could ever break her mother's heart by leaving too.It's very light Christian fiction, but the characters somehow get under my skin and I found myself with tears in my eyes two or three times as I read this book. Easy reading that's somehow difficult to put down.
—Sue

I read this book to my wife - it's one of the few things that we can do together. It is another Janette Oke book. It centers upon Clark and Marty after they return home from a visit with their oldest daughter, Missie and her husband Willie out "west". Marty discovers that she is pregnant and that, along with the romance of their youngest daughter, Ellie, becomes the underlying theme for the remainder of the book. This was book 5 of the series and because of the final chapter, It seemed that this was planned to be the final book of the series, but there are more. I have book 6 on hold at the library, so we will see what more there is in the life of Clark and Marty.
—Allan67

I'm going through and re-reading the whole series. In 2012 I only read 6/8 of the books. My goal is to read all 8 this year. I really like the pacing of this book. In many of the books I feel like you miss big chunks of time (especially #2 which covered more than a decade and would skip years at a time). This one covers a year and doesn't skip large chunks of time. SPOLIER: I really appreciate the honesty Marty had with regards to pregnancy. It's not always easy having a surprise baby. One thing that kind of surprised me though is I did the math and Luke would have been born when Marty was 27/28 years old. Marty is 43 in this book with her surprise child. How did she not have children for 17 or so years? Not saying it couldn't happen, but she had all her other kids in quick succession and there is no talk of pregnancy issues or child loss. I suppose the reader is to assume she had issues, but one thing I would have liked to see in this series is more talk of child loss/ infant mortality since it was at a high percentage. Yes, there are a few families mentioned who have had issues in this series but in order to reflect reality it should have been pretty much every family. Another thing that isn't talked about enough is disease (although it seems like books 6-8 will get into that more-we’ll see). Diseases like cholera, dysentery, smallpox, measles, mumps, TB, and so many others were super common and "normal" back then, yet I hear nothing of them in the first 5 books. Once again, in order to reflect reality better it should have been much more prevalent in the books. Going back to this book though, even though it is more romance-y than any of the books before it (I am not a big romance buff) I do like this book better than some of the other ones in the series. Unlike the movies the series is based off of, it is not cheesy and when discussing Ellie's relationship, although there is a lot of emotion, it comes from very practical problems which I can appreciate instead of scoff at. Also, this is the first book in the series that didn't have a big "plot hole" (see my other reviews to understand what I mean) so that's awesome.
—Kristal