A Passion Most Pure (Daughters of Boston #1) - Julie Lessman

This book was on my watch list and it popped up for $2.99.  I read Hope Undaunted and was willing to give the author another chance.  I actually get this author mixed up with Julie Klassen, who seems to be one of the authors I enjoy a lot.

This book follows the O'Connor family.  Mainly the story is about Faith, who has had a hard childhood.  She lost her twin sister to polio, and while she survived, she has a slight limp resulting from the disease.  She thinks that her sister is more beautiful than she is and she'll never find love.  The man that she's been in love with since she was a girl is interested in her sister, Charity.

Collin lost his way after his father died.  Now, he's more concerned with what he desires, which is women and drink.  When Faith gets Charity in trouble for seeing him, he decides to confront her.  Instead of telling her off as he had planned, he notices something in her that he is drawn to.  His lack of faith in God causes him to draw away from Faith.  God means everything to her.  He decides to remove Faith from his heart by marrying Charity.

I have to say that I really wasn't happy reading this book.  I ended up hating most of the characters for one reason or another.  Was there a happy ending?  Yes, but I wasn't sure anyone deserved one.  These characters were just doing things that made no sense to me. 

Faith is a prime example.  She claims that things like kissing should be avoided, but then she appears to have no issues kissing just about every man in the book that isn't part of her family.  The "love" she says that she has for two men in the book is hardly what I would term real love.  When Collin leaves to go to war, he tells her that he loves her.  Yet a month later, Faith is falling in love with some other guy, going so far as to get engaged to him.  He's only 14 years older than she is, by the way, and the family was having fits over Collin being 5 years older than Charity...

Formatting errors made reading this book somewhat of a nightmare.  There is no separation from one character's section to the next.  You can end up crossing the ocean when you think that you're just starting a new paragraph. 

I don't think that the writing was bad or that it was a completely bad story.  It just wasn't for me at all.  I need more happiness and hope in the books that I read.  I can see why people like this author, but I just don't think that this author is someone that I'll enjoy.  I'll avoid her in the future.  There are two more in this series that follow Charity, A Passion Redeemed, and their younger sister Elizabeth, A Passion Denied.