After the Rain by Rita Gerlach, © 2015

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This handsome gentleman of the early 1900s is the inspiration for Jackson O'Neil, the hero in 'After the Rain'.

    --author Rita Gerlach


available for purchase ~ paperback & eBook

I purchased this copy of After the Rain by Rita Gerlach and highly recommend this historical fiction.

Back cover: He becomes the love of her life. She becomes his biggest challenge.
It's 1908, a year in the Edwardian Age, the year J.M. Barrie’s play What Every Woman Knows, premiered in Atlantic City and the first Model T rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. It is a year when the world faced one of its worst disasters in history, when the New Year would heal the wounds of loss.
   Louisa Borden lives a privileged life in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a new and thriving community on the outskirts of Washington, DC for the well-to-do. Against the wishes of her domineering grandmother, she retreats from the prospects of a loveless marriage and instead searches for what she hopes is her calling in life.
   When her horse is spooked along Rock Creek, she is thrown from the saddle—an embarrassing situation for any affluent young lady. Soaking wet, bruised and humiliated, she is carried up the muddy bank to safety by Jackson O’Neil, a stranger to the city, who changes the course of everything, including the lives of all those around her.

My review:
I loved the flow of this story. Jackson O'Neil and Louisa Borden are separated from each other after they meet. I admire Louisa for continuing on nobly with her life when her interest lies with Jackson, along with an unknown future. Her widowed father travels for business and she is left at home with a cantankerous Gammi who has little use for Louisa. Louisa's best friend, Amy Lockhart, has been away from home for months. Instead of bemoaning her station in life, Louisa cares for others and their needs, and goes to serve a Thanksgiving meal at a mission with her dear, close maid, Millie.

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the characters in After the Rain. Even some I wouldn't have expected! Wait until you find out what a mule and a new Buick have to do with each other!

1908 Buick Model G

Amy returns home and Dr. and Mrs. Lockhart invite Louisa to join them during Christmastime while her father is abroad and Gammi has gone back to England with distant relatives. She had been certain a visiting childhood friend of Louisa would be just the right match. Louisa decides not, and desires to marry for love and not money. Mrs. Lockhart, Amy, Louisa and Millie, go to visit Amy's Aunt Annabelle Fairchild in Long Island in mid-winter.

Receiving troubling news and not hearing from her father, Louisa travels to stay with her elderly great aunts, Mildred and Maude, in a small country town in Virginia. Her life takes a different turn as she oversees a children's home, continuing from an endowment funding patronage begun by her mother years before.

This story is so thorough and you come to care for secondary characters who enliven and nourish so richly.

The scar may remain, but with forgiveness it will not fester.
Louisa ~ After the Rain, 293

Love this quote. A story well worth reading!! Built very well and you come to know the characters in a genuine way.

Author Rita Gerlach