The Tender Years [Paperback]

So far, I like every books I have read that was written by Janet Oke.

The tender years by Janet Oke is a very good book. Janet Oke is a very good author, I can relate to this book because just like virgina I am to a teenager. There is so much you learn from this book and is a wonderful experiance. Virgina and her family is a big family like the brady bunch. Almost every one wants a big family. I think every one should read this book it can teach you alot. Happy reading!

As someone who enjoyed Oke's Love Comes Softly series and read all the books in it twice, despite their tendency to get a bit less well-developed and padded after the first few titles, I was very interested when the Prairie Legacy books came out. I was glad to see that a break from writing about the Davis family and their children seems to have revived Oke's ability to make up new, detailed incidents in the lives of Marty and Clark's daughter, Belinda, the man she was about to marry at the end of _Love Finds a Home_ and their five children, esp. teenage Virginia. Despite quibbles--like that the story seems to take place in a vacuum, as far as the outside world is concerned (no radio, no mention of the Depression or whatever period the book is supposed to be taking place in), or that Belinda would have been summoned to nursing duties by way of the phone at the time the book occurs, instead of by someone running to her house to tell her about an amergency (someone must have mentioned this to Oke, because they definitely have a phone by the next book), or that Clark and Marty *must* be at least six or eight years older than they are supposed to be in the otherwise wonderful where-are-they-now? prologue--I enjoyed the book and devoured it in one evening. Virginia's friend, Jenny, is very manipulative, but Virginia's conflict between pleasing her parents and satisfying her own ideals on the one hand and wanting to fit in on the other was something that anyone who remembers their growing up will identify with, and Virginia's conflicts after her own conversion, as she desires to see Jenny saved and worries about alienating her or being a horrible Christian example but also wants to avoid moral compromises and gives in to all-too-human emotions, as we all surely do, made the story compelling. I was not one hundred percent content with the way the mystery thread of the book was resolved, but I was pleased enough in other ways that my pleasure outweighed my quibbles, and I wanted to read the next book.