Her Daughter’s Dream is the second book in the series by Francine Rivers. This book follows Marta from the first book until her death, Hildemara from the first book until she’s in her 90’s, Hildemara’s daughter Carolyn, Carolyn’s daughter May Flower Dawn and then finally, her daughter, Faith. As you can see that’s quite a lot of daughters and the book pretty much brings everything up to the current age.
It leaves off exactly where the previous book ends so I’d actually recommend making sure you’ve got this book sitting in the tbr pile when you start the first one. Francine Rivers seems to be the kind of person who likes doing that with her series books. I had the same problem with her Mark of the Lion trilogy.
I actually prefered the sequel in this case as well. I don’t know for sure if it was because the more modern lives of Carolyn and Dawn were easier to relate to or they just made more mistakes growing up similar to mine but I found I empathised with the two of them more than I had with the previous two. This book also managed to make me cry at several points, very suddenly at one point too. Having a box of tissues handy while reading may well be very wise.
With the conflict between the first two women and the resulting conflict it causes between the next two I admit I was expecting some kind of working through or a resolution at some point during the two books and I wasn’t dissapointed. Although it wasn’t possible to entirely resolved everyone with everyone, (five generations can’t all easily live at once) they did manage to sneak in a few well thought through plot points to make sure Hildemara understood Marta did love her.
While both books focus more on the females of the family than the males there is still some story around the relationships each woman has with their husbands. Some of those men sure had to put up with a lot as well. I felt sorry for them on more than one occasion. They didn’t help either though in some cases. A lot of them had quite the desire to sign up for the military in some way or another. With all the other issues the girls faced it made quite a few of them worse.
Over all I’d be very surprised if Francine Rivers didn’t manage to touch on at least one issue most daughters have with their mothers. There were quite a lot of relationship struggles and misunderstandings and with any luck readers will be able to look at their own relationships in a fresh light. Misunderstandings are sometimes so easy to form and so hard to get rid of.
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