Review: A Vision of Lucy by Margaret Brownley

Lucy Fairbanks is a twenty-year-old woman with a passion for photography, a tendency to allow her curiosity and impetuousness to get her into trouble, and an unfortunate habit of talking too much, particularly when she is nervous.  The man known as David Wolf is a half-white, half-Native American living in Texas only a few years after the end of the Indian Wars.  He has returned to Rocky Creek to find the four men who drove him out of town as a ten-year-old boy, and to reclaim the box they stole from him, the box that he hopes will hold the key to his identity.  David and Lucy meet when he rescues her from a stagecoach robbery-gone-wrong (and quickly finds the most effective way of quieting the talkative woman).  

While her father keeps trying to marry her off, Lucy wants a career in photography.  Unfortunately, her first assignment for her local newspaper ends when the unscrupulous printer rewrites her story about the ‘wild man’, David Wolf, which results in him being shot and Lucy secretly nursing him back to health.  David faces further trouble when man goes missing, and David is suspected of being involved, which presents both characters with problems. 

Lucy is a likeable character, although she has her faults – she is talkative, freethinking and possibly overly independent, while David is more private (to the point of being secretive). Although A Vision of Lucy is the third book in Brownley’s Rocky Creek series (following A Lady Like Sarah and A Suitor for Jenny), it can easily be read as a stand-alone.  A Vision of Lucy is a formula Western romance, but is no less enjoyable for its predictability, with the instant attraction between Lucy and David providing both enjoyment and some frustration (well, as the saying goes, the path of true love never did run smooth, and this is especially true in romance novels).

Oddly enough, this is the second historical Christian Fiction I have read about a lady photographer (the other was A Bride's Portrait of Dodge City, Kansas), but both were quite different in tone, with A Vision of Lucy being the lighter of the two.  This was an enjoyable novel, and while for the most part it was a light-hearted romance, it did touch on deeper issues including discrimination, revenge, forgiveness, and how our upbringing affects our views of God.  I would certainly read more books from this author.

Thanks to Thomas Nelson for offering this as a free ebook in an online competition.