A review by amelia990
Holding the Line by Jennifer Delamere

4.0

This book was on a display in my library so I picked it up and read it on a Saturday morning.  I enjoyed it and thought it was well written and engaging.  This was shelved as "inspirational" in my library but I felt it was more "historical clean romance."  (The characters are religious, but in a way that is normal for the time and I did not find religion to be a main driver of the story).  The heroine tries to stop a teenage girl from pulling a Lydia Bennet and ends up falling for the girl's uncle (who is also trying to prevent the same problem).  I enjoyed the story and liked how, despite this being a series, the couples from the prior entries do not take up a lot of page time in this novel.  Instead, the feature characters are given time to have their own stories on their own terms (something that is rare in these series-type things).  I also liked that the author was provided enough pages to tell the story she wanted to tell.  There was a point where I assumed we were getting near the end because of how these types of stories have patterns, and when I checked and saw I still had 100 pages left, I was pleasantly surprised.  The author also made good use of those 100 pages to continue to develop the story.  The one thing I'd have liked to see that was missing was the conversation between the heroine and her mother in law where the truth about the heroine's first husband could be discussed; it happens off page and I think it would have helped both women to have that conversation on page to find resolution about some of the things that were causing them problems.  Overall, I enjoyed reading this book and I'll be checking out her other books.