A genteel bit of titilation as some older friends find letters from 2 Civil War soldiers and set out to discover who they were, how they met, and who their descendats are. The conversation is pretty inane. The story is supposedly 'spiced up' by a subplot of the local minister falling in love with a woman from India. ( )

A Blue and Gray Christmas(Ladies of Covington #9) by Joan Medlicott
Have read the rest of the series and hadn't known about this book. What a treasure.
The women live at the farmhouse, and the worker in the orchard found an old box buried and brought it to them.
Letters from soldiers: one from south and one from north. They read and figure out the soldiers did not return home after being rescued and taken care of. They worked on the woman's farm and took care of her.
They each had married and started a family, one had a family back home but he just wanted them to forget about him and never wrote to them. The letters they had written were not mailed.
The women put the pieces together and with help from Milo they trace back to the ancestors and decide they need to hae a celebration at Christmas with all the families there.
They track them down and what an extravanganza it is. Love catching up with medical things with the women, their careers and their love lfies as only 2 live at the farmhouse but the women see each other very often.
Story also follows the paster who wants to marry a young woman and her child. She is getting a divorce form her husband who lives in Inda and she must explain to her family.
Feel like I hit the jackpot with this book because there are two stories in the same town being told.
I will now track down other works by this author to be sure i've not missed any more of her works.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device). ( )

Mediocre Christmas story....much like reading something from a Guidepost book series- just not the quality. Multiple storylines were not cohesive , overall? Disconnected fluff. ( )

After being moved by the letters of two Civil War soldiers--one Union and the other Confederate—Grace, Hannah, and Amelia track down the soldiers' descendants and invite them to a Christmas reunion in Covington, where the letters will serve as holiday gifts.

Mildly interesting story of the hardships of life during and after the Civil War and the kindness of people in present day bringing long lost relatives together. There was a sub-plot of conflicts with an inter-racial relationship in town that was interesting. Just so-so for me. ( )

This book is actually part of a series, I didn't actually know that until I looked it up afterward, but there were only a few times I felt out of the loop while reading. The story was unique, I hadn't yet read anything quite like it before, I liked how this story was narrated in the present and lived in the past. The dialogue between the characters in the present seemed to fake and cliche to me and I disliked that part more than anything else. I enjoyed the friendship the two "former-enemies" shared most of all though. This book was just OK to me, a nice Christmas, read-once, kind of book. ( )