Lady of Milkweed Manor Book

Julie Klassen writes well in a technical sense, but I found this story disturbing. Charlotte's predicament, the way she got into it, her miserable family situation, and all the strange and sad and sinister circumstances around her didn't make for a very pleasant tale. The period details were probably the most interesting part. Suspension of disbelief was too much work to be worthwhile. The ending was both predictable and extremely awkward; to jump from the heart of a dramatic climax to a garden scene some decades later and sneak the information about the resolution in almost in passing is NOT a technique I would recommend! It was almost as if, having made Charlotte's situation as agonizing and emotionally intense as possible over the course of the novel, the author suddenly ran out of ways to make things worse, and so dropped her into a happy ending of the cheesiest kind just to be done.
I also missed any kind of good spiritual influences. The father was a pastor, but the type of pastor who deserves to be vilified; Charlotte did read parts of the Bible a few times; and other than that, nothing God-honoring stands out. The way the characters behaved, before, during, and after their various traumatic moments, left me uncertain whether any of them had any real religion, much less personal relationship with God, and I have serious questions as to the author's intentions along those lines!