Endless Chain

✍ Scribed by Richards, Emilie

• Book ID: 108228043
• Publisher: Mira
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 690 KB
• Series: Shenandoah Album 2
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781426829079

✦ Synopsis

With the warmth and comfort of a handmade quilt,Endless Chain explores the intricate patterns of family and community, and the threads that bind them together

Sam Kinkade is finally feeling at home as a minister in rural Toms Brook, Virginia, content with his life and Shenandoah Valley congregation. But his plans to welcome the area's growing Hispanic community are being met with resistance. Fortunately, when the church-run community center is threatened, a stranger named Elisa Martinez walks through his door and Sam realizes he has found a woman capable of building bridges.

Elisa isn't looking to make connections. She has come to Toms Brook to hide. But despite her fears of discovery she is enchanted by the beautiful work and the friendship offered by the women who invite her to join their quilting circle. And even though she fears the consequences for both of them, she finds herself powerfully drawn to Sam, and to a generations-old love story rooted in the town's past.

Will she and Sam repeat the past, or can they find the love and the freedom they seek at last?

From Publishers Weekly

The backwater town of Toms Brook, Va., again forms the bucolic setting for the second installment in Richards's Shenandoah Album series (Wedding Ring), a densely plotted romance centering on Elisa Martinez, a refugee from Guatemala, and Sam Kinkade, minister of the Shenandoah Community Church. Hiding a dark past, Elisa arrives in Toms Brook seeking the job of church sexton as the community deals with a recent influx of Hispanic immigrants. Not all members of the Shenandoah Community Church welcome the newcomers, but Sam Kinkade spearheads a church-run effort to create "La Casa Amarilla," an educational program for Hispanic children housed in a pre–Civil War house with an incredible history. From the get-go, sparks fly between Elisa and Sam, who is engaged to an Atlanta society belle. Richards weaves numerous subplots around Elisa and Sam's growing love: her escape from political strife in Guatemala, the challenges facing both working class and educated immigrants like Elisa, plus the history of a runaway slave who once hid in La Casa Amarilla's historic building and whose tale parallels Elisa's. Throughout this heartfelt if often implausible novel, the women of the church's quilting bee support Sam's religious calling to make a difference, Elisa's gradual revelation of her past and the couple's blossoming relationship. (July)
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From Booklist

Toms Brook, Virginia, a hamlet in bucolic Shenandoah Valley, might seem an unlikely place to harbor an international fugitive, and yet for Elisa Martinez, it's a perfect hiding place. Fiercely protective of its privacy and independence, it welcomes outsiders, at least until the area's Hispanic community grows to proportions that make the locals uncomfortable. When an outreach center at the community church becomes a target for vandals, activist preacher Sam Kinkade is presented with a serious challenge. Hiring Elisa as the church's new sexton just might be the answer to the church's--and Sam's--prayers, although Sam doesn't realize that the enigmatic Elisa is wanted in her native Guatemala on false murder charges. Against both their better judgments, Elisa and Sam fall in love, a situation that Elisa fears will jeopardize her safety and possibly end Sam's career. As she did in her first quilt-inspired Shenandoah Album novel, Wedding Ring(2004), Richards seamlessly joins contrasting and complementing elements--an intriguing political mystery, a long-forgotten local tragedy, and a contemporary love story--in an emotionally charged and transcendent tale of the ways love and faith can triumph in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. Carol Haggas
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