Jewel of Promise

I don't know what happened to the review of this book that I wrote three months ago, but here goes again. This is the concluding book in the four-book Treasure Quest Series, following _Silver Highway_, which was set along the Mississippi River and in Pennsylvania during the late 1850's, _Colorado Gold_, which followed some of the characters west and introduced some new ones as the Civil War was beginning back East, and _Out of the Crucible_. In _Jewel of Promise_ we return to Pennsylvania and to the South as the Civil War begins. Alex and Olivia, who met and fell in love in _Silver HIghway_ are seen for the first time since that book, as they seek to do the little that they can to hold their splintering country together. As southerners, they love the soon-to-be-seceding states as their first home, but as seemingly unlikely recruits to the underground railroad who have come to know and love Quaker friends in the north, they cannot willingly follow their home states out of the Union. After a visit to Alex's family in South Carolina, whom Olivia had not previously met, they return northward amid obstacles created by the newly begun war. Alex and his friend, Mike, who has been recently piloting Alex's riverboat, the Golden Awl, become involved in the Union war effort. Olivia and Beth, a young woman from Kentucky who has run away from home and won Mike's heart, work on the homefront, which in this war is sometimes dangerously near the battlefields. Soon Olivia's brother, Matthew, and her Creole school friend, Crystal, return from the western territories as well, and their hope to remain reunited is tested sorely by the war. For all of these characters _Jewel of Promise_ is a story of hope (symbolized by the brooch that Alex gives Olivia), dangerous captures and escapes, fighting to help others amid hate, hard decisions about political loyalties and love, the difficulty sometimes of being honest with oneself and others, and the struggle to keep hope alive when circumstances appear hopeless. Wells evokes varied scenes at home and in battle and shows vividly how both the many continuing characters and the new ones, like Mike and Beth, grow gradually and believebly. I finished this book feeling sorry that the story was over and that I would not again see these characters whom I had come to care about so much that I had devoured the latter three books of the series in a week of constant reading. Still, Marian Wells had by the end accomplished all that she needed to in order to satisfy a reader's curiosity and anxiety about the characters' experience of the war, so even as I was sorry to leave the characters, I was happy that I had read the books. If you want an exciting historical novel with romance and the added dimension of Christian elements that grow naturally out of the characters, rather than seeming stuck in for their own sake without being necessary, then try the Treasure Quest Series.