Despite years on the run, Sophie Neumann is determined to care for two young children. She won't abandon them the way she thinks her older sisters abandoned her. But times are growing desperate, and when she falls in with the wrong crowd and witnesses a crime, she realizes fleeing 1850's New York is her only option.
Disappearing with her two young charges into a group of orphans heading west by train, Sophie hopes to find safety and a happy life. When the train stops in Illinois for the first placement of orphans, Sophie faces the most difficult choice of her life.
Reinhold Weiss has finally purchased his own small farm. With mounting debts, a harvest to bring in, and past scars that haunt him, he's in no position to give his heart away . . . but can he say no when his long-lost friend shows up on a nearby train pleading for his help?
Searching For You is the third and final novel in Jody Hedlund's Orphan Train trilogy, and it finally reveals to the readers of this series whatever happened to Sophie, Olivia, and Nicholas -the three children Elise and Marianna spent so much time searching for in the previous two novels. In this novel, however, Sophie is no longer a child and is angry, hurt, and shame-filled as she attempts to care for the two little ones in any way she can. As a result, she ends up on an orphan train, eventually separated from the two she loves most, and in the same town as her old family friend, Reinhold. Reinhold has been in all three novels, and I was cheering for him at this point to finally find peace and contentment. I really enjoyed the twists and turns in this novel (I was also rooting for some matchmaking between other, minor characters, but the author left that to the reader's imagination) and seeing the main characters grow stronger together and in the Lord. It was sweet to see both Reinhold and Sophie learn to confess and surrender their fears and failures to God and to experience both His and others' love and forgiveness anew. I really enjoyed this series as a whole, and I look forward to seeing what stories Jody Hedlund chooses to write next!
I received this novel from Bethany House through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
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