Author: Pamela Ferris-Olson
ISBN:  978-0-615-34066-1
Publisher:  Out of the Box Publishing Company LLC

Click Here To Purchase Living in the Heartland: Three Extraordinary Women's Stories

This book is about three women and the choices they made for their lives.  Each woman, a different nationality with perhaps more in common than they knew, all living in the Dayton area.  These real women, Nancy, Ife, and Ellyn give us a detailed view of their experiences through life and what those choices meant to them and their families.  These are ordinary women doing ordinary things.  They are women that have not always made the best decision when you look at it from the reader’s point of view but they still learned from their mistakes and made the best of their situations.

Pamela Ferris-Olson keeps the tone of the book in check in a way I have never read an author do prior to her.  The tone never takes on the “feel sorry for me” tone prevalent in so many books about women and their choices.  The almost proud tone is refreshing in that it doesn’t apologize to anyone for what happened nor does it take on a “blaming” attitude that circumstances were to blame for choices these women made.  This alone is heartwarming as women are survivors and in spite of the bad choices that are made over and over again sometimes, these, like so many women find their way out of situations using their strength and eventual wisdom.

I felt the Introduction was longer than necessary and almost took on a tone of justification of why the book was written, which was surprising considering the tone of the remainder of the book.

The author took Ellyn’s story and seemed to dig deeper into the family since Ellyn was adopted.  Pamela Ferris-Olson did a wonderful job at incorporating the different thoughts and feelings of so many people in this family.  The inclusion of the emails and diaries were especially helpful in creating the heart strings that connected the reader to the family, during times the family was apart from each other.  There was a real sense of “knowing” this family and all they were going through.

The postscript was also done well letting us know what has become of these women and even though their lives were not easy ones, they carved out success in their own terms and made it happen with their determination and stamina.  They all continue to live life to the fullest.

 Click Here To Purchase Living in the Heartland: Three Extraordinary Women's Stories