Recently this title was brought up on one of my Tapestry of Grace email lists. It was mentioned by a couple of people how they didn't particularly care for the "romance" in the book. Because this book is on the Upper Grammar and Dialectic levels literature selections in TOG, meaning my DD would be suggested to read it (and soon, since we were coming up to that particuar week of study) this caused a flag to go up for me, setting me forth to read this book.

Well, I *just* finished the book and LOVED IT!!! IMO, what romance there was in this book was actually quite innocent (ESPECIALLY by today's standards) and was quite appropriate for the setting of the book and age of the characters. This so-called romance, IMO, wasn't even actual courtship, as it is nowadays... but merely some home-visits by the young man, coming to call on the young lady. Needless to say, at least for our household, this so-called romance is a non-issue in this book.

The wonderful details offered in this text painted beautiful pictures in my mind of the home, the town, the boats, the people. The power of friendship was strong in this book. The heroine does find herself quite caught up in troubles because of it. The matter of disobedience is something that is addressed in the text, and will certainly be a point of discussion in our own home (LOL.)

Anyway, I'm going to have my 9yo UG daughter start reading this book, probably today, in fact. I found some nice background info in a PDF here on the author as well as questions on the book to use as discussion points that we'll be using. (I copied many of the questions to a simple text file to just have on hand throughout the book.)  Additionally, there is a free cyberguide (Word .doc format) for this book here  that offers some really nice links that would work well not only with this book, but also for overall lessons/studies of this time period.

Had this topic not been brought up on the email list, for the good or bad, I might not have read this book myself. I'm so glad I did and look forward to the upcoming discussions with my daughter. If I had not read it myself I'd have just asked for chapter narrations (which I'll still do.) What a great book to bring our current TOG topics "to life"... how the people of that area/time lived day to day, the troubles they faced, their religious beliefs, etc. DD loves when books "take her to a place" and I hope she likes this book as much as I did. I'll have to wait and see.