This is kind of a quiet story about family, and community and healing. He doesn’t want to burden Marty with more than she can give. This is not one of those Marriage of Convenience books where the hero decides, “To heck with her, I have needs,” and then forces the sexual issue. He sees that Marty’s hurting, and he does everything in his power to give her what she needs: time, space, and privacy. He may not be the most impressive conversationalist ever – he’s a man of few words – but he’s kind and thoughtful and good.
Of course Clark is really anything but cold-hearted. She doesn’t understand this strange, coldhearted man she has married. Marty has little choice but to accept, but she does so bitterly and with a grudging, aching heart. He is present at Marty’s husband’s burial, and, seeing that she’s desperate, he proposes a solution for both of them: that she marry him and be a mother to his daughter, and, in return, if she wishes to return East in the spring, he will pay for her passage as long as she is willing to take Missie with her. His wife passed away several months ago, and he’s had a difficult time keeping up the farm while caring for his tiny daughter, Missie. What’s a girl in these circumstances supposed to do?Ĭlark Davis is a rather successful farmer with a similar problem. She also has an unexpected complication: she’s pregnant. The local people are sympathetic, but there is little they can offer Marty, who has no money and no way of getting back East since fall is closing in, and the last wagon train East has already been and gone. Clem left to go and inspect their land, but he came back dead, thrown from his horse. She and her husband Clem were on the last leg of a journey west. Martha (Marty) Claridge has just been widowed. We already have several copies on the shelves, so I decided to take this one home and see if the magic was still there. A few weeks ago someone donated a copy of it to our library. It seemed a lovely way to pass a Sunday afternoon.
I found it crammed in the shelves next to my Grandma’s tattered Bible and her frayed, sunbleached copy of Crowning Glory Hymnal. I read this book over and over when I was oh, maybe 12 years old.
A simple, sweet prairie story by a Canadian author, it nevertheless became a word-of-mouth bestseller, and the Christian fiction market has never been the same since. If Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower changed the romance fiction market forever in 1972, in 1979 Love Comes Softly did something of the same thing for the Christian romance market which had been stagnating since the death of Grace Livingston Hill in 1947.
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