The Brushstroke Legacy

June 5, 2006
Snelling (Saturday Morning
; The Healing Quilt
), known for her inspirational romance novels, sets this story largely in North Dakota. Ragni, a single woman who is struggling with her job and her father's Alzheimer's disease, agrees against her will to fix up her great-grandmother's cabin. She's accompanied by her teenage niece, Erika, who has taken to wearing all black and rarely talks to Ragni anymore. Snelling takes this opportunity to weave together Ragni's story with the story of Nilda, her great-grandmother, who traveled out by train in the early 1900s to be a frontier housekeeper. Both women encounter hardships—like the plague of grasshoppers that strips the crops in Nilda's time or Ragni's more humorous attempts to get Erika to adjust to life without modern conveniences. Both of them paint; when Ragni and Erika discover some of Nilda's paintings, they begin to feel close to her and are inspired to continue their own artistic pursuits. And both Ragni and Nilda enjoy romance with interesting men. The story has its sweet moments, but is largely tedious: the dialogue plods, the characters have little emotional depth, the historical details are sparse and the conclusions are not believable. And while the main character is a modern-day 30-something, the book is written in a style that will appeal most to older readers.