June

Mail-order bride June Kallahan arrives in Seattle from Michigan to discover that her intended, Eli Messenger, the assistant to a famous evangelist named Isaac Inman, is ill. After he dies, June stays on to work at the local orphanage, where she realizes Inman is allowing the orphans to go without in order to build a showy tabernacle. A romance blooms between June and Parker Sentell, a friend of Eli's, as they try to convince Inman of the errors of his thinking. Like its predecessor (Faith, LJ 11/1/98), this smoothly written romance should please most readers, although the characterization of a flawed clergymanAan intriguing twist in a genre that usually demands perfect behavior from its religious charactersAmakes it a cut above many other Christian romances and may help it appeal to a wider audience.