Review: What Heals the Heart (Cowbird Creek #1)

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

From Goodreads:
Joshua Gibbs survived the Civil War, building on his wartime experiences to become a small town doctor. And if he wakes from nightmares more often than he would like, only his dog Major is there to know it.

Then two newcomers arrive in Cowbird Creek: Clara Brook, a plain-speaking and yet enigmatic farmer’s daughter, and Freida Blum, an elderly Jewish widow from New York. Freida knows just what Joshua needs: a bride. But it shouldn’t be Clara Brook!

Joshua tries everything he can think of to discourage Freida’s efforts, including a wager: if he can find Freida a husband, she’ll stop trying to find him a wife. Will either matchmaker succeed? Or is it Clara, a woman with her own scars, who can heal the doctor’s troubled heart?

Two stars? Two and a half? Maybe three, but not full three. What Heals the Heart is captivating, but there were a few things that bothered me.

Review: Memory of Water (Teemestarin kirja)

“ The ceremony is over when there is no more water. ”

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

From Goodreads:

Some secrets demand betrayal.

'You’re seventeen, and of age now, and therefore old enough to understand what I’m going to tell you,’ my father said. ‘This place doesn’t exist.’

‘I’ll remember,’ I told him, but didn’t realise until later what kind of promise I had made.

When Noria Kaitio reaches her seventeenth birthday, she is entrusted with the secret of a freshwater spring hidden deep within the caves near her small rural village. Its preservation has been the responsibility of her family for generations.

Apprenticed to her father, one of the last true tea masters, when Noria takes possession of the knowledge, she becomes much more than the guardian of ancestral treasure; soon, she will hold the fate of everyone she loves in her hands.

The heartbreaking ending is worth the wait.