Riddle

What do you get when you cross a REAL bodice-buster romance with Christian Fiction? Francine Rivers' Not So Wild a Dream may be the answer. Francine Rivers now writes Christian Fiction and I've read, and reviewed, many of her books. I'd say she's one of the best writers out there writing Christian Fiction. However, in the 1980's she wrote mainstream romance novels, books she has now pulled out of print and warns readers about on her website, making sure everyone knows she wrote them before she became Christian. I've read that Not So Wild a Dream was written after she experienced a religious conversion but before she decided to change genres. This is a story about a young woman who was born to a mentally ill Scottish-American fur trapper and a native American woman. While the man is in town one day Indians raid their home and kill her mother. A few years later her father sells her to a farmer who is looking for a wife. The man is kind and good and reads to her from the Bible. He talks to her about God. She fights the man all the way, wanting to go back to her father, but as he is dying she realizes she loved him too. Next, she becomes involved with a scoundral who teaches her a lot more about sex than she learned from her husband. They end up running a casino and when he leaves her, he left her with it (and it was a money-maker). The last man in the book is similar to the farmer, except that he is a seaman. He wants her, but wants her love, not just her body. Yes, its a love story, and yes, it ends happily. It isn't really Christian fiction since there are plenty of sex scenes and lots of immorality by the "good" characters but the woman's search for God does play a part in her life and how she views these men. I enjoyed the book.