What do You think about When Breaks The Dawn (2005)?
When Breaks the Dawn continues right where When Comes The Spring leaves off. In When Comes The Spring, the community is desperate but resourceful after a horrible fire destroys the village's supply store. Without these resources to see them through, the whole community is at risk. Alone these families and individuals have little chance, but, working together, well, they might just survive: not that it will be easy, but still, there's hope. When Breaks the Dawn begins with the arrival of the supply wagons and with the return of Ian and Nimmie McLain. When Breaks the Dawn is about Elizabeth's struggle for peace and contentment, in a way. She loves, loves, loves her husband, but, how can she stop WORRYING about him and where his work takes him?! She has embraced the community and made a handful of good friends, including a BEST friend, Nimmie, but she can't help feeling envious of her friend at times. For Elizabeth's BIG BIG BIG struggle is infertility. She is disappointed and frustrated and angry and bitter and broken up over the fact that she has not been able to conceive. She sees Nimmie have child after child, she watches little ones in the community grow up; she can't understand why something she wants so very very badly doesn't happen for her. Why hasn't God answered that prayer, that very specific prayer, that prayer that she prays so faithfully?! Elizabeth is incredibly vulnerable in this one. She opens her heart and her home TWICE to native children in need of an adoptive home. One, a little girl, Susie, I believe. She lives with Elizabeth and Wynn for months before her mother is able to take her back. And a second child, a newborn baby boy, Samuel, whom they take in for about a year. Elizabeth is emotionally crushed in this book; in many ways, it is a sad book. But I like the fact that this book deals with a hard subject in a very honest way. The happy but shallow Elizabeth from chapter one in When Calls The Heart has been erased by the all-too-human Elizabeth whose dreams of a perfect-perfect-perfect life has failed her. In When Breaks The Dawn, Elizabeth has to choose to be thankful and learn that God is GOOD.
—Becky
I am so glad that I live in a time when there are infertility treatments and adoption is common. Having gone through years of infertility and loss, I was really able to identify with Elizabeth. I really appreciated that the Delaney's were not "magically" able to conceive just because they stopped worrying about it. Yes, it's fiction, but it's much more realistic and easier to identify with this way. So much fiction about infertility ends that way... it's not at all realistic. Yes, at times, God does decide to make the infertile fertile again- but more often than not He leads them to adoption.
—Malia
“The Birth of a Frontier Wife” In this 3rd book of the Schoolteacher Meets Mountie quartetElizabeth and Wynn are firmly established in the little Indian village in the Canadian northwest. Kip, their silver-furred husky, comes into his own. With the return of Spring the long-awaited supply train arrives so the villagers do not starve and the men can rebuild the burned-out trading post. Nimmie, Elizabeth’s dear Indian girlfriend, urges her to take up her dream to establish a school for the Native American children. Of course her beloved Wynn, the Law and convenient boogeyman to Indian children, always has his duties--some of which prove dangerous or sad: disease, doctoring, death and burial, flooding, theft, combating witch doctoring, fur-stealing, selling liquor to the natives and outright murder.This Christian novel explores the heartbreak of parenthood—and that of Non-parenthood. Many babies are born during the course of this novel, but it is Elizabeth’s’ dearest desire to have a child of her own; for three years she has not been able to conceive. Could there be something wrong with her—or with Wynn? Should she consult and local Medicine Woman or undertake the difficult trek to distant Calgary? Twice she thinks she has inherited a substitute child to nurture and fill the ache in her heart, but cruel disappointment and bitter frustation follow each attempt. Eventually she comes to doubt God’s grace and even to question His divine plan for her life. Despite years of earnest prayer she remains barren (like the Old Testament’s Hannah) and almost loses her greatest treasure: her faith in God. Her journey of repentance and spiritual renewal gives a new interpretation of the word, DAWN, in the title. November 28, 2014
—Gale
