When The Morning Glory Blooms by Cynthia Ruchti

About the Book:

Becky rocks a baby that rocked her world.

Sixty years earlier, with her fiancé Drew in the middle of the Korean Conflict, Ivy throws herself into her work at a nursing home to keep her sanity and provide for the child Drew doesn't know is coming.

Ivy cares for Anna, an elderly patient who taxes Ivy's listening ear until the day she suspects Anna's tall tales are not the ramblings of dementia. They're fragments of Anna's disjointed memories of a remarkable life.

Finding a faint thread of hope she can't resist tugging, Ivy records Anna's memoir, scribbling furiously after hours to keep up with the woman's emotion-packed, grace-hemmed stories.

Is Ivy's answer buried in Anna's past? Becky, Ivy, Anna--three women fight a tangled vine of deception in search of the blossoming simplicity of truth.

My Thoughts:

How quickly can you get to a bookstore?  Seriously, you HAVE to read this book!  "When The Morning Glory Blooms" just may be the most important work of fiction I've read all year.

The story speaks of three women separated by generations.  Becky is helping raise her grandson, an unexpected blessing and sometimes more than she can handle.  Ivy is an unmarried mother in an age when you hid as long as you were able, and no one spoke of it.

When Ivy takes a position at a care home she meets Anna and begins helping her write her story...a story of a home for pregnant girls who were tossed aside like yesterday's garbage, shunned and rejected by all...except Anna.

Oh, how gorgeous this book is!  It reminds us to rain grace instead of shame, to open arms instead of raise angry fists, and that we're all prone to sin and need salvation.  Sometimes being Jesus' hands and feet is costly and uncomfortable, but the rewards span generations.

My own mother was 16 when I was conceived, back in a day when it was a family shame.  She hid me under baggy clothes and my grandfather wouldn't tolerate talk of the pregnancy.

Until I was born.

Then I became his secret...his daughter who wasn't his daughter, and I lived with that secret until the day he passed away.  Talk about complicating someone's life!

Let's bring our sins out into the light so that we may be healed.  Let's be okay with letting one another know we aren't perfect.  And let's embrace the sinner while showing them the path to the Savior.  Then, just like the morning glories, true beauty will abound.

I received a copy of "When The Morning Glory Blooms" from Abingdon Press in exchange for an honest review.  I'm ever so grateful that they published this book and that I received a copy.  Thank you, Cynthia, for creating Anna, Ivy and Becky, and for teaching us how to love them better.

Happy Reading!





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