To Win Her Heart

‘To Win Her Heart’ by Karen Witemeyer in a Christian historical romance that takes place in 1887 Texas.

Levi Grant has just gotten out of jail where he spent the last two of his life, and finally found God. His father was a blacksmith and taught him and his brother everything he knew. Now that he has given his life to the Lord and turned a new leaf, he has applied for a job as a blacksmith in the small town of Spencer. The pastor of that town, David Cranford, learned of Levi through a prison ministry program run by his old seminary friend, Pastor Jonathan Willis. With Willis’ recommendation, Cranford contacted the man who owns the smithy and lives in Austin, Mr. Calvin Spencer. The town has been without a man to run the smithy for four months and its springtime, when planting needs to be done and things need to be fixed. Levi can start work in the smithy, just as soon as Mr. Spencer’s representative has given the OK and Levi signs the lease to the smithy.

Eden Spencer is sick of men asking for her hand only because her father is rich, so she has sworn off men and moved from Austin to the small town of Spencer where her father has a another house. Here she feels like a part of the community by running a library out of the house and by being her father’s representative in the town, since he owns some property there. Her first thought when seeing the new town’s blacksmith, is that he’s huge. She isn’t too happy with Levi when he refuses to call her by her name and calls her ma’am instead. It makes her feel like an old lady.

Levi has a problem with saying the letter ‘s’. He stumbles over the letter and almost hisses them. He was picked on in school for that a lot. One year a new teacher came and gave him a way to keep him from being picked on. He told Levi to read anything and everything he could get his hands on. It would broaden his knowledge of words, so when he’s speaking, he can replace any word that has an ‘s’ in it with a similar word. So there’s no way that he can call her by Miss Spencer, with three ‘s’ sounds in her name!

It takes a while to understand this giant of a man who runs the smithy, but Eden comes to like him and he becomes her friend. Of course there have to be problems, and that is the local sheriff. Sheriff Conrad Pratt thinks that he should marry Eden, not some two-bit man with hardly any money to his name. And he has trouble taking Eden’s no for an answer; and her second no and her third no. All the while claiming that she belongs to him and that she’ll come around one day and say yes.

This is a wonderful story. And like many of Witemeyer ‘s books, this one has a minor love story seen through the eyes of the two major characters.