Summary of Love Never Fails
Manfred and
Sally’s daughter Molly Whiteman finishes school and returns to her home to
teach. When old friends of her parents come for a visit with their son Stefan
Elliot, Molly is attracted to the young man she admired when they were
children, but his position in the Army conflicts with her dislike of anything
to do with guns, especially the military.
After he leaves to rejoin his regiment, Molly
is both relieved and confused as to her feelings for him. Then an encounter
with a bank robbery and being held hostage changes her attitude and heart, and
she realizes that she does love Stefan even though she hasn't heard from him.
When her grandmother falls ill and passes away, Molly returns to Louisiana with
her family. While there, she learns that Stefan is home because of a
disfiguring injury in a battle and goes to see him only to have him reject her
because of the scars and wounds on his face.
Distraught, she leaves but causes her horse to
startle and run away with her in the buggy. Stefan witnesses the runaway and
goes after her on his horse despite his own injuries, but is not in time to
prevent an accident. Once she is declared all right with only a sprained
shoulder, Stefan once more retreats because he has no future to offer Molly,
only a scarred body. Will these two young people realize their love is true and
open their hearts and future to what God has for them?
Getting It Right
By Martha Rogers
I love a good story, but recently I have read two good stories by
a multi-published author that left me shaking my head. If the story hadn't been
good, I would have tossed the book aside. Things like head-hopping or changing
point of view within a scene with no warning and beginning sentences with words
that end with -ing had me pausing all the time and shaking my head. I had to go
back a few times to figure out how and why the POV changed.
Still I kept reading because the author created characters who
captured my attention and made me care about what happened to them. The plot
wasn't predictable and led down roads that seemed to have no connection, but in
the end tied all together in an interesting way. However, I will hesitate
before buying another book from this author. I have too many others in my TBR
pile to bother with this author.
We've heard it said so many times that the story is most
important. In the case of this author, she did all the things to make her
readers keep the pages turning even though she didn't follow all the
"rules" of writing. This was one of those stories that if I had been
grading it as I did the papers of my college students, it would have earned an
A for content and a D- for mechanics.
I have found the head hopping, poor sentence construction, and
grammatical mistakes more prevalent in self-pubbed books, but it can happen to
those from a recognized traditional publisher also. I'm not sure why this is
because editors should catch those things. The editor for the publisher of the
book descr
Perhaps multi-published writers can get by with this type of
writing as long as their story and characters are good and the readers like the
author. However, can an unpublished author seeking publication afford to make
those kinds of mistakes as the editor reads the manuscript? That will depend
entirely upon the editor who first looks at the manuscript.
Authors who go the independent route and publish their own works
need to have a professional editor go over the manuscript with an eye for
mechanics as well as story flow and POV. Some of the errors that show up in
these independent books tend to give the overall group a bad name.
No matter what route you take to publication, make sure your
manuscript is as clean as possible. Do the work it takes to produce a book of
quality, and you can reap the rewards of success.
Meet Martha Rogers
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