Angels Watching over Me »

Michael Phillips is one of the premier fiction authors publishing in the Christian marketplace. He has authored more than fifty books, with total sales exceeding five million copies. He's also the editor of the popular GEORGE MACDONALD CLASSICS series.

Phillips owns and operates a Christian bookstore on the West Coast. He and his wife, Judy, have three grown sons and make their home in Eureka, California.

Book 1 of SHENANDOAH SISTERS. Two young Southern girls, one the daughter of a plantation owner and one the daughter of a slave, barely survive the onset of the Civil War and the loss of both their families. When these tragic circumstances bring them together, they join forces to discover if they can make a life for themselves. As their preconceptions give way to experience, they gradually learn to value their contrasting and complementing strengths and skills as they face the formidable task of keeping body and soul together in the aftermath of this devastating war. But is it possible the Lord they have come to know has something bigger in mind for the plantation than either of them can imagine?

Publishers Weekly

In this first book in the Shenandoah Sisters series, Phillips, a prolific author and longtime CBA bookseller, offers a light historical novel with the flavor of young adult fiction. Mary Ann "Mayme" Jukes is a young African-American slave girl living in Shenandoah County, in North Carolina, in the 1860s. When marauding outlaw Confederate soldiers kill her family, she escapes to Rosewood, another plantation owned by the white family of Kathleen "Katie" Clairborne. Here, Mayme finds more devastation; 15-year-old Katie is the only person left alive. The girls become friends and together vow to run the plantation and keep the adults' deaths a secret until Katie comes of legal age to own the debt-ridden property. The book is mostly a collection of short, sketchy scenes, presumably setting up events for the next book in the series. Phillips's prose is simple and workmanlike, adeptly moving the events along. The reader is left with a few questions (the plantation is devastated, yet the girls have plenty of livestock and groceries), and the spiritual thread is fairly basic (God tells Mayme directly what to do, and they speak to each other in italics). The epilogue leaves the reader hanging until the promised second installment. Young evangelical Christian women looking for escapist historical fiction will find this passable, if not particularly memorable, entertainment. (Jan.)