Elizabeth Musser: By Way of the Moonlight

 By Kelly Bridgewater

Two courageous young women, tied together by blood and shared passion, will risk everything to save what they love most.

For as long as she can remember, Allie Massey, a gifted physical therapist, has dreamed of making her grandparents' ten-acre estate into a trauma recovery center using equine therapy--a dream her grandmother, Nana Dale, embraced wholeheartedly. But when her grandmother's will is read, Allie is shocked to learn the property has been sold to a developer.

Decades earlier, headstrong Dale Butler's driving passion is to bring home the prized filly her family lost to the Great Depression, but with World War II looming, she's called upon in ways she never could have imagined. And while her world expands to include new friends and new love, tragedy strikes close to home one fateful night during the Battle of the Atlantic, changing her life forever.

As Nana Dale's past comes to light in Allie's search for answers, Dale's courage and persistence may be just what Allie needs to carry on her grandmother's legacy and keep her own dreams alive.

 

My Thoughts:

By Way of the Moonlight by Elizabeth Musser is a time-slip novel featuring a horse ranch and broken dreams. The synopsis says some elements of the Great Depression and World War II, but the time period really was not that important to the story. The story does feature a modern day heroine, Allie, who is on a hunt for a cedar box among her grandmother’s things to see what was in it. The past is showing Dale, her grandmother’s, story and legacy with the horses. The writing was deep and could have been a lifechanging story for Allie and Dale, but the first third of the novel was really hard to get in to. The story does show Dale as she matures and starts to fall in love with Tommy. BUT in my personal opinion, there is no action. It appears to be a dynamic story, but I really need more action. Maybe have the heroine and hero react more to what happened to their family during the Great Depression. Show how it affected their riding life. Show how it affect their family dynamics and friendship. The Great Depression was such a horrible time for families and should have been a horrible time for Dale’s family, but Mussner glazed over it and focused on the horse training and young love. After a while, I prayed for the novel to end. I flipped through the story, praying to find some World War II action. Not much of that either. Overall, By Way of the Moonlight by Elizabeth Musser really did not capture my attention. I had a really hard time with the plot, wanting more.

I received a complimentary copy of By Way of the Moonlight by Elizabeth Musser from Bethany House Publishing, but the opinions stated are all my own.

My Rating:   3 out of 5 stars

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