Love Starts with Elle

By Rachel Hauck

Posted on November 5, 2008 12:00 AM MST by Tiffany Kinerson

Elle Garvey is in love with the local football player-turned pastor, Jeremiah Franklin. He’s smoldering and handsome, powerful and kind. And he’s asked her to marry him. Problem is, he also accepted a high-profile pastorate in Dallas, Texas, before he proposed. An unexpected change in the Beaufort, South Carolina, native’s life, but Elle decides she can give up her little cabin by the river and even her successful art gallery for the sake of love and The Call. Of her future husband, of course.

But months into the new pastorate and the engagement, Jeremiah hardly finds the time to call his new fiancée on the phone much less help her out with life changes or even plans for the wedding. And when their Dallas house hunt is botched somewhere between he wants and she wants, the man finally calls it quits for the entire relationship. She must not be ready for the kind of commitment he expects from a preacher’s wife.

But does she think she’s ready? Or more importantly, what does God think about all this? Elle’s heart seems to have been created for the artist’s world, but after years of disappointment in that creative industry, she’d settled for success in a different, more business-like arena of the industry. Could a gallery owner lead a double life as a busy pastor’s wife? And now, an interesting widower intent on writing a World War II love story has moved in next to her, causing more questions to emerge regarding the definition of true love.

Rachel Hauck (pronounced like house but with a k) is another of my favorite authors. This particular book of hers was chosen as a Top Pick in the Romantic Times Book Club for good reason. I enjoyed the ongoing parallel between the widower’s walk through his grief and Elle’s walk through her own. It was an insightful way to harbor understanding between two characters, and explored deeply yet without melancholy. And Hauck walks the reader through the power of prayer with a fresh description of God’s modern-day action. A feather, a change, a new life in Christ, all authentic ways in which the Lord can and will speak today. Hauck is a fresh and inspired voice in Christian romance. I give two thumbs—plus my big toes—up for Love Starts with Elle.
 

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