The Butterfly Bride (Sisters Book 2) Kindle Edition

Lovely as a butterfly ready to spread its wings, eighteen-year old Elfrieda, aka Elfie, has only been in America for a few weeks when, accompanied by her aunt, she arrives in a crowded little railway station where she immediately attracts masculine attention. “It is intoxicating since she’d escaped from the grim apartment in Hamburg to suddenly come to grips with how pretty she was.”Before her aunt leaves she tells Elfie. “I think you should be able to find yourself a fine husband here in this great valley just as your sister has done.Not surprisingly Elfie is worried about her new life, learning English, for many people of German origin regarded themselves as American, and helping her heavily pregnant sister on the farm and in the house from dawn to dusk.Although Elfie is well-housed and well-fed, she is dissatisfied. “Surely there was more to life than just going to church, cleaning the house, working and picking vegetables in the garden and then cooking them, going to the barn for eggs or her sister showing her how to milk a cow.”Waldron shows her readers the tension, which continues after the American Civil War. The resentment to those whose families paid for another man to fight instead of a male relative. To Elfie it makes sense that such a terrible war, one in which a staggering number of people had been killed and maimed, would leave anger behind. Yet people with opposing views, and who belong to different Christian sects get together at gatherings, social events and the races.Elfie flits like a butterfly from one handsome beau to another in her search for romance, but she knows she doesn’t want to marry a farmer and be condemned to a life of drudgery, even if she doesn’t know what she does want.I enjoyed Waldron’s novel, which captures times past and shows the changes time brings about in Elfie, the butterfly. This is the first book I have read by this author but definitely not the last.