This book took me a while to get into. There just wasn't much going on in the first half of the story to keep me interested. It wasn't bad. It just didn't grab me. The best parts were the scenes with The Blue-Haired Old Ladies. I laughed and alternated between thinking how sweet it was that the friends cared so much for each other and wanting to shake someone for poking her nose where it didn't belong.

I think what bothered me most about the book is that there really isn't any conflict. The characters all get along, with the exception of Adelaide's estranged daughter, and even that situation doesn't provide enough conflict to keep the story interesting. It could be argued that the conflict is between the family and the ghost, or the family and the house, but it just wasn't enough for me.

A little over halfway through the book, Marielle starts reading Susannah's letters written during the first part of the Civil War. Written from April 1860 through September 1863, the letters not only provide us (and the family) with the truth of what happened to Susannah, but brought in the historical angle that snagged me. I couldn't put it down after that.

I received an ARC of this book for free from WaterBrook Press through the Blogging for Books program.

It was hard to rate this one because I didn't really like the first 200 pages of the book, but I loved the last 100 . ( )

A really good piece of women's fiction. I especially liked the stuff where we went back in time and got to read all the letters that told the "truth of the tale". I got a little tangled up and worn with the whole mystic personification of the house, but overall, a good read with many threads and a lot of twists. ( )

Actually I picked the book up for my mother. I read through the first chapter and found myself reading more and more. It has a really surprising ending and nothing is as it appears to be. ( )

Susannah Page was a young woman during the civil war, her great granddaughter, Adelaide is ninety in the twenty-first century, and Marielle is her new granddaughter-in-law who has just married her grandson-in-law Carson Bishop four years after he became a widower. Marielle moves into the family home Susannah inherited and soon becomes swept up in Adelaide’s superstitions regarding the house and the superstitions of one of Adelaide’s friends that Susannah’s ghost haunts the house because apparently Susannah was a civil war spy. As Marielle settles into her new marriage and her role as mother to Carson’s two children, she works on sorting out the past tragedies and trial of the women of Holly Oak.

The characters are likable, the writing is fine, and I liked it, but it’s not the sort of novel I find particularly gripping now. It is labelled Christian fiction, but there really wasn’t much Christian about it other than that a few of the characters appeared to have faith a few times. ( )

I'm a big fan of Susan Meissner's contemporary fiction (not so much of a fan of her historical fiction) but I found it very, very hard to stay connected with this story. The main problem is that the focus of the novel is the house, not the characters living in the house during the present day (although they had interesting back-stories that would have been fun to explore more deeply) and the possibility that there were ghosts or curses attached to it. I have to give Meissner credit for attacking such a controversial topic in a novel geared for the Christian market but I felt that she didn't make it "real" enough to capture our attention (and again, that may have been deliberate to be able to market this book to Christians). I finally gave up about half-way through and wished that I was reading more about family dysfunction and whether or not this second marriage could survive, house or not house.

It probably didn't help that I read "The Lost Quilter" immediately before reading this book and Jennifer Chiaverni's emotional writing about the Civil War and slavery in general was much more powerful and real to me. Made "The Sound Among the Trees" seem trite and shallow. ( )