Christmas at Harmony Hill; A Shaker Story

I thought when I won Christmas at Harmony Hill; A Shaker Story (#351) by Ann H. Gabhart that this would be an interesting story set in a fictional Shaker community in Kentucky during the Civil War.  Not so!  I mean, the setting is correct, but interesting?  No.

The Shakers are consistently put in the wrong in this Christian fiction while providing free food, medical care, shelter and warmth to a young woman who is it odds with her father because she married a Union soldier and ran off to join his regiment as a washerwoman, which she continually claims as "honorable" work.  (Not in any history of the Civil War that I've read!)  When she can no longer handle the physical labor involved, her husband sends her home to her mother to have the baby.  By the time she arrives home, she finds that her mother and younger brother are dead from cholera, and her older brother has died fighting for the Confederate cause.  Her father is not about to forgive her for any of these things, for which he blames her.  Her sister smuggles a letter her mother had written to Heather, knowing she was expecting a child.  Her mother sends her for help to her Great Aunt Sophrena who joined the Shaker community at Harmony Hill many years ago.  But when Heather arrives, Aunt Sophrena is busy having  her own crisis of faith.  The Shakers do not believe in family life as the world knows it, and Heather is afraid that if she remains with the community that they will take her child away from her once it is born. 

Everyone is so busy quoting the Bible at each other that they seem to miss the point of Christian behavior all the way around.  I don't think any of the characters is admirable if you can bear to trudge through all the dreck surrounding the "fulfillment of God's Plan" for everyone.  Suffice it to say husband survives, baby is born Christmas Eve and Aunt Sophrena's problem is tied up neatly with a bow at the ending as she shakes off the dust of the Shakers' village.  Ugh.  Anne Perry's A Christmas Hope contains infinitely more profound thought for how a Christian should keep Christmas than this best-selling (!!!) Christian author.  Don't waste your time.