The Enchanted Barn - 1918
Grace Livingston Hill
107 pages ?
genre  - Romance, Inspirational Fiction
my rating  -  4 out of 5 stars

Over the years my mother has told me about her favorite books by Grace Livingston Hill.  I figured it was about time that I read one for myself.  I chose to read The Enchanted Barn.

Shirley Hollister, a young stenographer, is very worried.  Father has been dead for several years now and Mother is deathly ill. It is up to her and her younger brother, George, to support the family. 

Plus, they have received a notice that their apartment complex is being torn down and they have a couple of weeks to move out.  And it's coming up summertime.  It will be too hot for Mother to continue living in the city.  A new home needs to be found soon.

Taking advantage of an unexpected afternoon off, Shirley takes a trolley car going out-of-town.  She sees "...a wide, old-fashioned barn of stone, with ample grassy stone-coped entrance rising like a stately carpeted stairway from the barn-yard."  This would be a wonderful place to spend the summer.  Now if only the owner will rent the barn to them for no more than $12 a month!

Usually I don't enjoy reading inspiration stories as blatant as The Enchanted Barn, but somehow the author as able to pull it off.  Perhaps it was because I didn't feel as if I was being preached at, but that was just the way the characters believed.

Also, I don't think Amazon's estimate of the page count for this book is correct.  It seemed much longer than that.   Other editions of this book show that it has between 295 to 366 pages.



About the author  -

Grace Livingston Hill was born April 16, 1865  in Wellsville, New York to Presbyterian minister Charles Montgomery Livingston and his wife, Marcia Macdonald Livingston - both of them being writers.

Hill's first novel was written to make enough money for a vacation to Chautauqua in New York while the family was living in Florida. Lack of funds was a frequent motivator, particularly after the death of her first husband left her with two small children and no income other than that from her writing.

After the death of Hill's father, her mother came to live with her. This prompted Hill to write more frequently.

The last Grace Livingston Hill book, Mary Arden, was finished by her daughter Ruth Livingston Hill and published in 1947.

Hill died Jan. 1, 1947.