What Heals the Heart by Karen A. Wyle
Publisher & Release: Oblique Angles Press, October 15, 2019
Time and setting: Post Civil War, West
Genre: Historical Romance, Western Fiction
Length: 266 Pages
Heat Level: 1 Sweetheart
Rating: 3.5 Gold Crowns
Book Description:
Joshua Gibbs survived the Civil War, building on his wartime experiences to become a small town doctor. And if he wakes from nightmares more often than he would like, only his dog Major is there to know it.
Then two newcomers arrive in Cowbird Creek: Clara Brook, a plain-speaking and yet enigmatic farmer’s daughter, and Freida Blum, an elderly Jewish widow from New York. Freida knows just what Joshua needs: a bride. But it shouldn’t be Clara Brook!
Joshua tries everything he can think of to discourage Freida’s efforts, including a wager: if he can find Freida a husband, she’ll stop trying to find him a wife. Will either matchmaker succeed? Or is it Clara, despite her own scars, who can heal the doctor’s troubled heart?
Then two newcomers arrive in Cowbird Creek: Clara Brook, a plain-speaking and yet enigmatic farmer’s daughter, and Freida Blum, an elderly Jewish widow from New York. Freida knows just what Joshua needs: a bride. But it shouldn’t be Clara Brook!
Joshua tries everything he can think of to discourage Freida’s efforts, including a wager: if he can find Freida a husband, she’ll stop trying to find him a wife. Will either matchmaker succeed? Or is it Clara, despite her own scars, who can heal the doctor’s troubled heart?
What Heals the Heart, like Wyle's earlier novels, uses its settings and situations to explore universal themes. In this story, those themes include the lingering effects of psychological trauma, the difficulty of predicting the wants and needs of others, and the essential goodness to be found in ordinary people.
What Heals the Heart is the first of a projected series set in the same
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Vikki’s Musings
This is the first book I have read by Karen A. Wyle. What Heals the Heart is unique, and I want the thank the author for asking me to read and review it. My opinions are my own are not influenced in any way.
What Heals the Heart can’t be placed in any one category. While there is a lovely romance between the main characters, its full worth is in the historical details of what it must have been like as a country doctor in the west after the Civil War. I thoroughly enjoyed that aspect of this book a great deal.
Clara Brook is the heroine, and she has recently settled with her family in the small town where Joshua Gibbs has his medical practice. She arrives around the same time as Frieda Blum, a widow who has moved there from New York. Frieda immediately take a liking for the doctor and is determined to find him a wife.
However, Frieda does not believe is should be Clara and sets out to match the young doctor with a widow with a small child. This starts this tale of love and friendship. What Frieda doesn’t know is that Clara experienced many of the same horrors Joshua had in the war since she was a nurse. That gives the pair a strong bond.
Joshua Gibbs is the hero and the local doctor. He works tirelessly without very much pay. Most of his patients pay him in kind. Frieda has him looking at his life and how a wife would make it better. He begins courting the young widow, although there is something about Clara that draws him to her.
Even though he likes the young widow and adores her little girl, he still can’t see them together, and he’s not even sure he should wed. The horrific nightmares he had holds him back. When Clara assists him when a lad crushes his leg, and he sees Clara in a new light, but something happens that sends Clara running.
While he mulls over whether he should approach Clara, he finds her and an older gentleman at the train station departing for the east. There’s something in Clara’s eyes that troubles him. Should he forget her or go after her?
While the romance is not the focal point of the book, it does have a sweet happy ending. If you enjoy historical fiction and stories set in small towns, then you will like What Heals the Heart. It is an excellent example of small-town life in a western town. Happy reading!
Author Q&A
Q. What inspired you to write What Heals the Heart?
A. Durned if I know! Some of my novels have grown out of news items, whether current events or accounts of scientific or technological advances. At least one
started as a dream. But my earliest recollection of the seed for this book is a saved text file in which the protagonist was not a doctor but a private detective.
Q. What led you to self-publish your novels?
A. Once I finished the rough draft of my novel Twin-Bred, I began reading every blog and Twitter feed I could find, as well as several books, about the publishing process. At first, I was learning how to query agents and publishers, and how to format a manuscript for submission. But the more I read, the more I realized two things:
–Self-publishing was eminently feasible and would give me much more control over content, marketing and timing.
–In the current state of the industry, there are serious risks involved in the traditional route. More and more agency and publication contracts include language that can seriously limit an author's future options, while offering relatively little in exchange. Nor will the publisher who's preparing your book for publication in eighteen months necessarily be in business that long.
Q. Arethereanyspecificauthorswhosewritingstylesorsubjectmatterhaveinspired you?
A. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God are brilliant treatments of the theme of human-alien communication difficulties, the subject of my Twin- Bred series. Like me, she started with science fiction and then turned to historical fiction. Her books inspire me even as their excellence intimidates me.
I have also tended to gravitate toward novelists who explore themes such as the irrevocable impact of actions and decisions, whether obviously momentous or seemingly trivial – novelists from the 19th Century author George Eliot to current YA author Caroline Cooney.
Q. What do you like best about being a writer, and what do you dislike most about it?
A. I love it when the story decides to write itself! It's a bit like being a medium and channeling some spirit. I also find it extremely rewarding when readers tell me that one of my novels has moved them or even helped them through a difficult time.
My greatest ongoing gripe is the amount of work involved in trying to increase my visibility in the crowded literary landscape. However, as that difficulty is inextricably connected to the greater opportunities for authors these days, I try to focus on the positive.
Q. Do you plan to write more historical romance? More historical fiction in general? More about Cowbird Creek and its inhabitants?
A. Having taken the plunge into historical fiction – which I hope readers will consider an apt description of this novel, despite its belonging in the subgenre of historical romance – I think it likely I’ll paddle around for a while. First up will probably be a second romance set in Cowbird Creek, focusing on a couple of the secondary characters in What Heals the Heart. I’m also intrigued by the possibility of dealing more thoroughly and seriously with the impact of the Great Grasshopper Plague of 1874-1875, about which I learned only late in the process of writing this novel. After that – who knows?
I will, however, strive to finish editing another near-future SF novel, Donor, and may well publish it before the second Cowbird Creek book.
Q. Why are most of your previous novels science fiction?
A. I’ve been reading (and to a lesser extent, watching) science fiction for so long that I tend to view experiences, such as walking my dog and wondering what she’s smelling, and new information, such as news stories about conjoined twins or womb twin survivors, through a science fiction lens.
Q. Which of your previous novels are most likely to appeal to readers who enjoy What Heals the Heart?
A. I hope that even readers unfamiliar with science fiction will, if they give my SF novels a try, find a similar style, sensibility, and thematic focus in those stories. That said, perhaps the novel closest in tone to, and whose subject matter has most in common with, What Heals the Heart is Wander Home, a family drama with mystery and romance elements set in a re-imagined afterlife. This afterlife has features which lend themselves to the confrontation of lingering personal issues and unfinished business. For example, you can relive any memory in perfect detail – and if someone else who took part in the remembered scene is there with you, you can trade places and remember the events from the other person's perspective. There are other aspects
of the afterlife that, while serving this same purpose, are also just plain fun. You can be any age at any time and visit any place that you remember or that anyone you meet – from any time in Earth's history – remembers.
Wander Home concerns a mother who desperately wanted a child, but who left that child in the care of her parents and grandmother for unknown reasons. The child, grandparents, and great-grandmother die in an auto accident four years after the mother's mysterious departure; the mother dies of stress cardiomyopathy ("broken heart syndrome") some time later, and is reunited with the family she left behind.
Author Bio:
Karen A. Wyle was born a Connecticut Yankee. After college in California, law school in Massachusetts, and a mercifully short stint in a large San Francisco law firm, she moved to Los Angeles, where she met her husband, who hates L.A. They eventually settled in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University. Wyle now considers herself a Hoosier.
Wyle's childhood ambition was to be the youngest novelist ever published. While writing her first novel at age ten, she was mortified to learn that some British upstart had beaten her to the goal at age nine. She finished that novel nonetheless. After a prolonged detour, she returned to writing novels in 2010. She has also published one nonfiction work, Closest to the Fire: A Writer’s Guide to Law and Lawyers, a guide to American law for authors, students, and anyone else wishing to better understand the American legal system.
Wyle’s voice is the product of many years of reading both literary and genre fiction. It is no doubt also influenced, although she hopes not fatally tainted, by her years of law practice. Her personal history has led her to focus on often-intertwined themes of individual identity and responsibility, family, communication, the impossibility of controlling events, and the persistence of unfinished business.
Social Media:
Website: http://www.karenawyle.net/index.html
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KarenAWyle/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KarenAWyle
Author Blog: http://looking-around.blogspot.com/
Goodreads Profile: http://www.goodreads.com/kawyle
Email: http://kawyle@att.net
Mailing Address:4475 N. Benton Court, Bloomington, IN 47408-9564
