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Valley of my heart
thick blue softcover
514 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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6 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 20, 2025
This book has been on my radar for quite a while, but because of the size of the book, I was always a little scared of actually picking it up. I needed a chunkier book to finish out a reading challenge recently, though, and this proved to be the perfect option.
What a story! I didn’t expect the amount of suffering I encountered in this book—watching the family struggle to just have enough food to eat for years on end was bad enough, let alone the war raging around them and in their hearts! This is an unforgettable look at what many people experienced in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War.
From a faith perspective, I loved different bits of advice Ellen was given through the story. Things like one time, when a couple of characters were discussing fear and grief and the need for faith, and one character said, “You cannot build faith on darkness or confusion.” His point was that your faith is built or torn down by what you focus on—so he was encouraging her to look to God, rather than focus on her worry and fear. Wow.
I did find the many different dialects through the book a little hard to read (there were different ones for black slaves, German-speaking people, etc.), and that made me realize that this is one story-writing style that I’m grateful has mostly fallen by the wayside in the 25(ish) years since this book was published. I didn’t realize I had a bit of a pet peeve against it before reading this book, haha!
One of the biggest things that impressed me was the amount of research that went into this book. Almost every chapter has two or more footnotes detailing the real stories from which the fictional account was drawn, and there are six pages of bibliography at the end of the book. That’s impressive—and gave me a lot more confidence in this story as being realistic fiction!
A good book, overall. I’m glad I had the chance to read it!
What a story! I didn’t expect the amount of suffering I encountered in this book—watching the family struggle to just have enough food to eat for years on end was bad enough, let alone the war raging around them and in their hearts! This is an unforgettable look at what many people experienced in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War.
From a faith perspective, I loved different bits of advice Ellen was given through the story. Things like one time, when a couple of characters were discussing fear and grief and the need for faith, and one character said, “You cannot build faith on darkness or confusion.” His point was that your faith is built or torn down by what you focus on—so he was encouraging her to look to God, rather than focus on her worry and fear. Wow.
I did find the many different dialects through the book a little hard to read (there were different ones for black slaves, German-speaking people, etc.), and that made me realize that this is one story-writing style that I’m grateful has mostly fallen by the wayside in the 25(ish) years since this book was published. I didn’t realize I had a bit of a pet peeve against it before reading this book, haha!
One of the biggest things that impressed me was the amount of research that went into this book. Almost every chapter has two or more footnotes detailing the real stories from which the fictional account was drawn, and there are six pages of bibliography at the end of the book. That’s impressive—and gave me a lot more confidence in this story as being realistic fiction!
A good book, overall. I’m glad I had the chance to read it!
December 12, 2011
Novel about a family who decides to join the Mennonites during the Civil War. I have often wondered about the impacts on the Mennonites in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civel War. This is a good story and actually contains footnotes.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews