“LADY HELEN FINDS HER SONG,” by Jennifer Moore, Covenant Communications, $14.99, 240 pages (f)
It’s 1813, and 18-year-old Lady Helen Poulter is enchanted with the sights and sounds of her new home in Calcutta, India, in “Lady Helen Finds Her Song.”
Her mother, Lady Patricia, recently remarried Brigadier-General Jim Stackhouse, and his new post in the British military took them to India.
Helen finds that not all of her fellow British expatriates have the same perspective about the culture, food and traditions.
Capt. Michael Rhodes, one of the officers who has spent most of his life in India and understands multiple languages, shares her perspective, and they develop a friendship that could be something more. However, she’s taken with the dashing Lt. Arthur Bancroft.
As military tensions grow, she’s invited on Gen. Stackhouse’s diplomatic trip to visit the palace of an Indian ruler, and finds a world completely different from her own that she does her best to navigate. As she gets wrapped in political tensions and a brewing battle, her affections sway between the two men and finds she will need to make a choice, if it’s not too late.
Utah author Jennifer Moore brings to life the sights and culture of a country halfway around the world, through Helen, an accomplished pianist, and Michael, who knows it’s futile to be attracted to an officer’s daughter and feels more at home in India than in his English homeland.
It’s an interesting historical romance in a unique location that adds to depth of the storyline.
There is some minor swearing, which was highly improper for a woman such as Helen, and none of the romance goes beyond kissing. There is some violence, but it’s generally described.
“Lady Helen Finds Her Song” is a Whitney Award finalist in the historical romance category. The awards recognize fiction by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.