I have noticed that my recent book reviews contain words like horror and graphic violence, so just for today, I would like to go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Grace Livingston Hill was a Christian writer from the early 20^th century. The author of over 100 books, she wrote clean, inspirational romances set in her current time. Though her books are labeled as ‘romance’, the stories focus more on the main character’s journey to faith and understanding.

Brentwood and Head of the House are my favorite books by Hill. In Brentwood, Marjorie loses her adoptive parents, so she sets off to find her birth family. Having grown up in wealth and privilege, she is stunned to find her relatives living in poverty, her birth mother extremely ill. In Head of the House, Jennifer is struggling with grief over the death of her parents when she learns that greedy relatives intend to separate her siblings and send her away to Finishing school until she can be married off. Determined to stay together, the siblings sneak away and begin a journey of discovery and recovery.

These books are clean and old-fashioned with a message of love, faith, and family. They take you back to a simple time when people took holidays instead of vacations, scrounged up a nickel for a bowl of soup, or went to Woolworth’s to buy a card of buttons for your gloves. In today’s hectic, stressful, and confusing times, it is nice to slow down and take a breath. A cup of tea, an overstuffed chair by a sunny window, and a Hill book would be a wonderful way to detox and reset your emotional well-being.

Most of Hill’s books are available in reprint through book retailers like Amazon or BAM, and through Christian bookstores. They are also available on Kindle.

Head of the House – Jennifer Graeme is just blossoming into womanhood when tragedy befalls her family and she is left in charge of six younger brothers and sisters. Relatives move in to take over the family home and split up the children, and Jennifer feels she has no option but to flee with her siblings, taking refuge on the family’s houseboat and then at a remote mountain cabin. But she will need a miracle to keep the children together and safe. That is when unexpected help steps in.

Brentwood – Marjorie Wetherill had always known she was adopted; her parents, whom Marjorie loved deeply, had made no secret of it. Their death leaves Marjorie well provided for, but terribly lonely. Soon she is consumed with a desire to find the family she has never known. But how can she, when she knows nothing about them – and when Evan Brower, her handsome, wealthy neighbor, seems determined to make her forget about them entirely?