Rachel Fordham brings us a delightful “Romeo and Juliet” meets “You’ve Got Mail” tale with “The Letter Tree.”
It’s 1924 in Buffalo, N.Y., and Laura Bradshaw has very little to look forward to. With an overbearing father and a mother who passed away seven years ago, she feels trapped. Forced to hate her shoe factory owning father’s competition, the Campbell family, she has few friends and is allowed to participate in few activities.
The one thing she has come to rely upon — the Letter Tree located inside the Buffalo Zoo and the letters she finds hidden inside it. For the past seven years, she has been placing letters to an unknown person inside a hole in the special tree. She has no idea who the identity of her special pen pal is, but it fills her world with a special glimmer (“Like her very own fairy tale, this secret exchange felt magical, whimsical — and hopeful”).
Isaac Campbell seeks to get away from his father’s strict ways. He wants more for himself than just occasionally working at their family’s shoe factory. But as circumstances suddenly are placed in his life, he begins to find a better purpose and a hope.
Fordham does an incredible job of developing a plot filled with real places and based-on-true-life people and experiences, including a giant elephant named Big Frank. She develops a story filled with tension, drama, romance and mystery. And she creates intriguing and enigmatic characters, some you will definitely want to root for and some not so much.
She also fills “The Letter Tree,” which is due out Oct. 31, with some great themes, like God gives us desires and will help us achieve them; the desire for freedom and to be rescued; choosing bravery; hate can become habitual; and finding our meaning and purpose.
Fans of historical fiction will love this story.
Five stars out of five.
Thomas Nelson provided this complimentary copy through NetGalley for my honest, unbiased review.