Customer Reviews

Phoebe Deane

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Phoebe Deane is a beautiful orphan who is forced to live with her much older half-brother, who is rather indifferent to say the least, and his jealous wife, who enjoys putting Phoebe to work a little more than she should. Phoebe accepts her life, disappointing as it is, and makes the best of it. But a middle-aged widower who lives nearby with his passle of ill-behaved children is about to turn her life upside down with his near obsession with making her his wife. Naturally, he has her family's support and they go out of their way to throw them together...unknowingly putting Phoebe in grave danger. But all this is made bearable by an unforgetable meeting with a handsome young stranger in the woods who is willing to protect Phoebe where her family will not.
A beautiful love story of faith, intrigue, and endurance that put me very much in mind of Cinderella. Anyone who likes Grace Livingston Hill's books should check this out. It is definately one of her best works.

I was very excited about reading Phoebe Deane, as I had just recently finished reading the first of Grace Livingston Hill's Miranda Trilogy. The story is a good inspirational read, perhaps a little old fashioned, but then I love old books. The Publisher, however, should be ashamed at the quality of this book. There were at least 10 mispelled words per page, which could be humorous at times but I often womdered if perhaps the book was in written in some kind of secret code that I could not decipher.

This is a sweet story about a mis-treated orphan girl, Phoebe, who lives with her older half-brother and his family and they work her to the bone. An obnoxious local widower named Hiram Green takes it in his head to marry Phoebe when she turns 18, and proceeds to make her life miserable, while her sister-in-law and even her brother try to promote the marriage. Phoebe becomes friends with Miranda Griscom, the outspoken freckled red-headed girl, who readers may remember from a previous GLH story, "Marcia Shuyler." Phoebe flees to the woods one day to cry her heart out, and is discovered by . . . I won't spoil the plot, but everyone gets what is coming to them.

Okay, now to the technical stuff -- this is pitiful editing. For instance, David & Marcia Shuyler's little daughter, Rose, is referred to variously as Eose, Bose, and Hose. You have to take it in context that this is really little Rose. I couldn't help but burst out laughing at the description of "sweet little Hose." Pictures of a green garden hose tormented me for the next page. And that is just a sample. If you can wade through the scanning errors, the story is sweet, and perhaps provides some comic relief. Since I'm a long-term GLH fan, I am glad to have it on my Kindle, but if you're not a die-hard fan, this will be tough reading for you.

Phoebe, like her late mother, is a sensitive and lovely girl living with her easy-going but weak half-brother, Albert, and his shrewish managing wife, Emmeline. Very few people in the town understand Phoebe although Albert realizes that she is different and tries to be kind. Hiram Green, a vulgar and conniving widower, wants to marry Phoebe, first in admiration and then in revenge because she refuses to have him. Enter Nathaniel Graham, a strong, caring type, who is a lawyer and nephew of the town judge. Nathaniel is attracted to the gentle Phoebe although he thinks she is promised to Hiram.

The real heroine is Miranda Griscom, a feisty, rustic young red-head who is Anne Shirley and Pippi Longstocking combined and whose helpful ways are effective but hilarious. Miranda is a bright-eyed Girl Friday to Marcia and David Spafford (all from Hill's book "Marcia Schuyler") who figures out and foils (with Nathaniel's help) Hiram Green's devious plans to force Phoebe into marrying him. Not being welcome in Emmeline's house is not a barrier to Miranda as she blithely sneaks in and out over the back woodshed roof to Phoebe's second-floor room. Miranda even travels to New York, ostensibly to buy herself an outfit for Phoebe's scheduled wedding to Hiram Green, but really to let Nathaniel know what's going on. That the wedding takes place with an unfamiliar groom, unanticipated guests, a hitherto unseen bridal outfit and Hiram's unexpected (for him) comeuppance makes for a pretty satisfying story.

I had no idea when I picked up the kindle edition of this book that it was considered "christian fiction", otherwise I probably wouldn't have. (Not that I have anything against it, just the name sounds boring and preachy, that's all!) There was nothing overtly "christian" in this book, other than the morals of the character maybe. This was the sweetest book, a sweet, clean, romance with the best charactarization I've read in a while. The character Miranda, reminds me of the character portrayed by Rene Zellwegger in "Cold Mountain" - an absolutely hilarious, totally endearing and lovable, loyal, if a bit strange, girl. And the villain in this book is the best bad guy ever, completely repulsive, hateful...just his name, Hiram Greene, makes me cringe! I was very pleasantly surprised by this book. I picked it up because it looked like a light, fast read and because it was only 1.99 for the Kindle version, there wasn't much financial risk involved. This might be on my list of favorite books now. However, one very annoying detail that should be disclosed is that this is obviously an OCR'ed kindle version, which means that it is FULL of mispellings, weird punctuation and spacing issues and they can be distracting. I figured it out pretty soon into the book and if you keep that in mind when you come upon a totally unrecognizable word, you can get past it. (for instance, there is a character in the book named "Rose", I think her name is only spelled correctly once or twice, the rest of the time it is spelled with every letter in the alphabet OTHER than "R", Eose, Nose, Pose, Oose, etc.) Very very annoying, but you can't lay the blame on the author or even the the author's editor for this. Blame the slackers that translated the book! Highly recommended despite all that. Especially at 1.99.

This is a great little book. I stayed up last night to finish it.