THE OUTSIDER (ANN H. GABHART)

Story Description: 

She thought she was content – until a love from the outside world turned hers upside down. 

Gabrielle Hope and her mother joined the Harmony Hill Shaker community in 1807.  The community promised stability and devotion that Gabrielle wholeheartedly embraced.  But when a local doctor must be brought into Harmony Hill from the outside, he sets into motion a chain of events that will challenge Gabrielle’s loyalty to the Shakers. 

As she falls deeper into a forbidden love for this man of the world, Gabrielle must make a choice.  Can she experience true happiness in this simple and chaste community?  Or will she abandon her brothers and sisters for a life of the unknown? 

Soulful and filled with romance, The Outsider lets you live within a bygone time among a unique and peculiar people.  This tender and thought-provoking story will stay with you long after you finish the final chapter. 

My Review: 

Gabrielle Hope and her mother, Martha, entered the Harmony Hill Shaker community when Gabrielle was just 14-years-old.  Now it’s January of 1812 and Gabrielle is 19-years-old and has had five years to get used to being separated from her mother.  The Shakers do not believe in marriage and do not allow husbands/wives to stay together, nor can either keep their children near, they are housed and raised in a different area of the community and rarely seen. 

After a fire breaks out in the Harvest barn, Doctor Brice Scott, an outsider comes into the community to care for, Nathan, whose legs have been badly burnt.  While there each day checking on young Nathan, the Doc sees Gabrielle and almost instantly falls in love with her.  His distractions are causing a great deal of grief for Gabrielle from the head sister, Mercy, and after having been seen kissing him in the forest, she is punished by having to be shadowed 24-hours-a-day by the surly Sister Helen for five long months.  Sister Mercy wants to ensure Gabrielle keeps her mind on her prayers and tasks within the community and off of Doctor Brice Scott. 

When the Doc heads off to war with Nathan, his heart and thoughts are of Gabrielle and how he is going to rescue her from the Shaker community upon his return from war, if he makes it.  But will she give up what she’s known for the past five years and step out into the outside world, a world she no longer knows and fears?