I will say that the story manages to stand on its own fairly well and I was engaged for the majority of the book. I have not read the original story, so I'm not sure how accurate or true the retelling is. This story is apparently a retelling of a bible story about two people named Gomer and Hosea. She trusts him with her body and her well-being long before she's willing to let him have her heart. It takes a long time before she's able to trust Michael, and when she does, it happens in stages. No matter how frustrated I felt with her as a character, I always felt that her actions were in line with her character. The epilogue of this book is straight out of a bodice ripper, and the more I found out about her backstory - neglect, abuse, rape, assault, incest, probably PTSD - the more I sympathized with her. Her bitterness is exceptionally well done, and the pain she feels is warranted. Much of the book is Angel learning to deal with her guilt and self-hatred. When he marries her, she's actually unconscious from a beating. She is not amused, and rebuffs him multiple times.

When he finds out what she is, he throws a mini-hissy before pulling up his britches and delivering Angel the news. On one of her walks, Michael Hosea sees Angel and hears God tell him that this is the woman he is destined to marry. Over the years she has become bitter and cold it's her only defense against her growing despair at sleeping with men she doesn't like in a prison gilded by the gold dust of the Californian mining town she's settled in.

Sarah/Amanda/Mara/Tirzah/Angel is a prostitute who was sold into the profession against her will as a child and then raped. Unless I somehow picked up a paranromal romance book without actually catching on.

All sex scenes are very much fade-to-black, or in the case of one scene, ends with the hero and heroine soaring towards heaven - metaphorically, I'd imagine. I apparently have the 1997 version, which was edited to remove swear words and explicit love scenes to make it religion-friendly, which is definitely the case in my version. As soon as I began reading this book, I literally had two people message me to inform me that this book allegedly takes two forms: the 1991 version and the 1997 version. Francine Rivers is a name that gets bandied around a lot, not just in the christian fiction groups, but also in the historical romance groups in general. Our theme read in the Unapologetic Romance Readers group for the month of May was 'christian romance,' and REDEEMING LOVE was actually my nomination.

I am not religious, so my review of this inspirational romance will be coming from the perspective of a secular reader.

Redeeming love francine rivers book