These Healing Hills

Here's another wonderful novel that takes readers back for some historical fiction that is based around facts about Frontier Nursing. In These Healing Hills by Ann H. Gabhart, Francine Howard defies her parents wishes and moves to the Appalachian Mountains of Hyden to learn about being a midwife to the people who have chosen to live away from the bigger towns. They have a different way to speaking, moonshine is still being processed and of course, people love their lifestyle but getting medical care can be time consuming especially with the terrain and often times weather.

Francine is a compassionate woman who loves learning about their way of life, even though those she works under remind her to keep her level of professionalism and not get to friendly with the people she treats. But how can you not be drawn into their simple ways of life, where money isn't the thing that motivates them and they take joy in raising their families away from the big city! She would have never dreamed this was the life for her, hoping instead to remain at home waiting for the man she believed would return home to her from the war and they would marry and begin their own family. Instead, Seth Miller, found himself another woman from England and was bringing her home to meet his family and how could she begin to compete with that?

So she took her broken heart and instead looked for ways to bring healing to others and catching babies, the Appalachian term for delivering newborns. She can't help but love each of the families she works with including Granny Em, an elderly woman who keeps to her way of life, handing out wisdom to Francine that flies in the face of the medical procedures she is being taught, including some weird medicinal home remedies using the plants she finds growing around the mountain. She just didn't expect to become part of the Locke family, treating their ailing young daughter, Sadie, as well as looking after their oldest daughter, Becca who is getting ready for her first child. Now that Ben Locke has returned home from the war, he can't help but fall for the one woman who would do more than heal the brokenness in their family but in his heart as well.

I received These Healing Hills by Ann H. Gabhart compliments of Baker Publishing Group and NetGalley. I love this story revolving around the historical facts about was started Frontier Nursing in 1925, that readers can enjoy at the conclusion of this novel in the Reader's Note section. You would wonder how people who lived far from town would have their medical needs addressed and so a nursing program was conceived that trained women to ride horses into the heart of the mountains, bringing with them healing and midwife skills to the people of the Appalachian communities. This eliminated the worry of how to pay for medical care since no one was ever turned away and the maternal and infant mortality rates decreased dramatically when this program was introduced. Well worthy of 5 out of 5 stars in this reader's opinion.

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These Healing Hills by Ann H. Gabhart 

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