Love Comes Softly

Marty Claridge is widowed on the frontier with nothing. Clem is dead, there is no man on the wagon, and winter is coming. Clark Davis, a widower with a small daughter, offers her an arrangement rather than a courtship: a roof over her head, and someone in the house for Missie, who turns two shortly after Marty moves in. Neither of them pretends it is anything else.

The engine is domestic and it runs slowly, which is what the title is announcing in advance. Bread, a cabin, a child, a winter. The neighbours, the Grahams, have had thirteen children and eleven are living, a piece of arithmetic Oke sets down without comment and which says more about the frontier than a scene of hardship would. The faith in the book works the same way, carried by what a household does every day rather than argued anywhere.

Bethany House published it in 1979. It was Oke's first novel and the first of eight in the series, and it is fair to call it where the modern inspirational-fiction shelf begins. The reservation is that it is a plain book on purpose. The prose is unadorned, the conflict stays low, the ending is in the title, and the moral world holds no ambiguity at all. Readers wanting interiority, or a character who might do the wrong thing, will not find one. Patience is its virtue and patience is what it is offering.